The music industry publication 'Music Business Worldwide' reported recently that Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music, and several other music publishers have filed lawsuits against Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, accusing the artificial intelligence lab of engaging in activities by 'illegally downloading, scraping, and accessing copyrighted works'.
The lawsuit was filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California last Friday evening. The publisher accused Anthropic of 'flagrant theft', using thousands of copyrighted works to train its AI model 'Claude'.
Sony and Warner have requested the court to award up to $150,000 in statutory damages for each infringing work. The complaint states that publishers claim to have copyrighted “tens of thousands” of works. Based on this estimate, Anthropic’s potential statutory damages liability could amount to billions of dollars.
Anthropic's spokesperson stated in an email press release that "We disagree with the accusations made by publishers and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in court."
In fact, this is not the first time Anthropic has faced intellectual property lawsuits. In this case, some lawyers also represented the Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a lawsuit filed in January of this year, and they led the “Bates v. Anthropic” case. In that case, a group of book authors accused Anthropic of using copyrighted works to train its AI model, “Claude,” and other products. The judge initially ruled that it was not illegal for AI laboratories to use copyrighted works to train models, provided that such use was obtained through legal channels; using pirated methods would constitute illegal activity. Ultimately, based on this preliminary ruling, Anthropic paid $1.5 billion in settlement.
The complaint cites the Butts case, stating that downloading pirated books was “to avoid the trouble of paying, with the hope that they might be useful for training large language models or other things.” Regarding scanning behavior, the complaint also references a 2024 Anthropic planning document that was decrypted from the Butts case: “We do not want others to know what we are doing.”
The publisher also alleged that Claude copied their lyrics word for word in the output content. Additionally, the protective measures added by the AI laboratory after the previous lawsuit were also claimed to be “easily bypassed with simple operations”.
The document states that “Anthropic clearly considers this to be merely a cost of doing business, as its entire business model still relies on copyright theft. And $1.5 billion is clearly not enough to deter a company from engaging in such infringement activities, which have resulted in an astonishing valuation of $2 trillion.”
The publisher also pointed the finger at Anthropic’s positioning: “Although they claim to be ‘ethical AI companies’, Anthropic has repeatedly acted in a way that contradicts their image, putting competitive advantages above compliance with laws.”
Sony and Warner's complaint also stated: "Music publishers recognize the potential of AI technology and have signed licensing agreements allowing for the use of musical works in AI. However, it is crucial that AI development must be conducted responsibly, and its terms must be agreed upon by the rights holders. Even the most revolutionary technologies must be developed within legal frameworks, and Claude's model from Anthropic is no exception."
