Sony and Warner sue Anthropic over "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history"
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Major music publishers, including Sony Music and Warner Music, have filed a federal lawsuit against Anthropic and its executives, accusing the company of using tens of thousands of copyrighted song lyrics and compositions to train its Claude models without permission. The complaint names CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants, alleging they directed and oversaw illegal torrent downloads of copyrighted material. The publishers are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work and additional penalties for removing copyright management information. The lawsuit focuses on Anthropic's acquisition of training data, including torrenting books from pirate libraries and scraping lyrics from licensed platforms. It also challenges Anthropic's use of datasets like Books3 and The Pile, and claims the company used synthetic data from a model trained on pirated texts to train or provide feedback to a commercial Claude model. This case follows Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors over pirated books, and a related German court ruling that song lyrics within model parameters count as reproductions.
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