Anthropic Faces New Music Publisher Lawsuit Over Alleged Piracy
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Sony Music and Warner Chappell allege a massive campaign of IP theft, signaling a high-stakes battle over how AI labs pay for training data.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, among other music publishers, have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California targeting AI lab Anthropic and co-founders Benjamin Mann and Dario Amodei. As first reported by Music Business Worldwide and later detailed by TechCrunch and The Verge, the plaintiffs allege a "brazen campaign" of illegally scraping, downloading, and torrenting copyrighted works to train the Claude AI models.
The complaint specifically accuses Benjamin Mann of using BitTorrent to download more than five million pirated books, while other employees allegedly downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. The suit also claims Anthropic scraped lyrics from LyricFind and MusixMatch, sites that pay for licenses. Examples of songs found in training data include Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings" and Bon Jovi's "Livin' On a Prayer," as reported by The Verge.
From a financial perspective, the stakes are massive. The Verge reports the plaintiffs are seeking up to $150,000 per work, plus $25,000 for each instance where copyright data was stripped, which could total several billion dollars. This follows a landmark case, Bartz v. Anthropic, where a judge ruled that using copyrighted works for training was legal, but acquiring them through piracy was not; Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in that instance, per TechCrunch.
Anthropic is currently facing a wave of litigation from other entities, including BMG, Round Hill Music, Concord Music Group, Universal Music Group, and ABKCO. In a statement to TechCrunch, an Anthropic spokesperson said the company disagrees with the claims and intends to defend itself robustly.