Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed suit on Friday, August 29, against Anthropic, the company behind the Claude artificial intelligence model, for using thousands of protected works, including song lyrics, to train its system. The publishers seek up to $150,000 per work, according to TechCrunch.
The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The music publishers, among the largest in the world, accuse Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann of running a large-scale campaign of illegal downloading, extraction, and reproduction of protected material. This is the latest in a series of lawsuits the company faces over the use of copyrighted content in AI model training. The Verge notes that in the Bartz v. Anthropic case a judge ordered the company to pay $1.5 billion, and that the current lawsuit also names the co-founders.
For the music industry operating in Mexico and Latin America, the case is being closely watched: labels that license Spanish-language catalogs are observing how the rules for licensing content to AI are being defined. The lawsuit seeks up to $150,000 for each infringed work and up to an additional $25,000 for each instance in which copyright identification data was removed. In total, it contemplates damages of several billion dollars if the court grants the maximum amount. The filing cites songs such as Livin' On a Prayer and Hallelujah among the works found in the training data, and contends that one of the co-founders downloaded more than five million pirated books and that the company scraped lyrics from sites that paid licenses to the labels.
Anthropic responded that it disagrees with the plaintiffs' claims and will defend itself in court. The case proceeds in parallel with other lawsuits filed by Universal Music Group, Concord, and BMG against the same company. The outcome will define the terms under which the region's music catalog is licensed to artificial intelligence systems in the coming years.
This article was written with artificial intelligence assistance based on verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.