Sony, Warner Sue Anthropic Over Claude AI Copyright Claims

Two of the world's largest music publishers are suing Anthropic, the company behind the AI system Claude. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell allege Anthropic stole copyrighted works to train its AI. They claim Anthropic conducted a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading" sheet music and lyrics. This allegedly included songs like ‘Uptown Funk’ and ‘Cruel Summer’. The lawsuit also names Anthropic's co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The publishers allege Mann personally torrented millions of pirated books, some containing copyrighted lyrics and sheet music, at Amodei’s direction. They also claim Anthropic scraped lyrics from websites, removed songwriter credits, and then created models that reproduce these lyrics. The songs allegedly stolen include ‘Uptown Funk’, ‘Cruel Summer’, ‘Hallelujah’, ‘Eye of the Tiger’, and ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’. The publishers are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per song and up to $25,000 each time songwriter credits were removed. With tens of thousands of songs allegedly involved, the total damages could be in the billions. Anthropic stated, "We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.” This lawsuit highlights ongoing legal disputes about how AI companies obtain data for training their systems.