Sony & Warner Sue Anthropic Over AI Copyright Infringement

Sony Music and Warner Chappell, along with 33 other music publishing entities, have filed a lawsuit against AI company Anthropic. They are suing Anthropic, its CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann in a U.S. District Court. This legal action follows Universal Music's earlier lawsuit against Anthropic in the same court. The music companies allege that Anthropic's Claude AI model was trained using pirated materials, specifically lyrics and music scores. They claim that Anthropic downloaded millions of pirated books and crawled website content, infringing on potentially tens of thousands of copyrighted works. The music companies are seeking substantial compensation, with potential damages reaching billions of dollars. This is because a maximum of $150,000 can be claimed for each intentionally infringed work. Anthropic previously paid a $1.5 billion settlement in the Bartz book copyright case for downloading pirated books. This new lawsuit signals a growing conflict over copyright in the AI era.