Sony and Warner sue Anthropic over AI training data

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, the developer of the AI model Claude, alleging the unauthorized use of tens of thousands of copyrighted musical works for AI training. The legal action, filed in the Northern District of California, names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants.

The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic obtained protected compositions through BitTorrent networks, unauthorized libraries, and web scraping from services like Musixmatch and LyricFind. The lawsuit further claims that Anthropic utilized datasets such as Books3, Common Crawl, and The Pile, and even digitized second-hand books containing lyrics and sheet music.

A central component of the litigation is the output of the AI; the publishers argue that Claude is capable of reproducing song lyrics verbatim or nearly verbatim. The companies are seeking damages, which could potentially reach significant amounts, including up to $150,000 per willful copyright infringement and $25,000 for instances where copyright management information was allegedly removed or altered.