Sony and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over copyrighted songs used in AI training
Sony and Warner sue Anthropic and its founders in federal court over alleged copyright theft
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic and two of its co-founders on August 28 alleging mass copyright infringement to train the company’s Claude AI tools.
The complaint was primarily filed in the US District for the Northern District of California named Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as co-defendants alongside the company.
The lawsuit reads: “Plaintiff Music Publishers, a group of the world’s leading music publishers, bring this action to hold accountable the culprits behind one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”
Defendants Anthropic and its founders have engaged in a flagrant pattern of digital piracy, scrapping and downloading copyrighted worlds on a larger scale in order to develop, operate and secure substantial yields from Anthropic’s Claude series of AI models.
According to music publishers, Anthropic harvested innumerable copyright works in violation of copyright law and then systematically copied those works, harming the Music Publishers and the songwriters they represent.
The publishers are seeking formal disclosure and requesting Anthropic to pay damages of up to $150,000 per deliberate infringement, and $25,000 for each instance of tampering with copyright data. In addition, Anthropic is chasing a valuation of about $2 trillion ahead of its public offering.
