Sony Music and Warner Sue Anthropic Over a “Brazen Campaign” to Steal Content

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and a number of other music publishers have filed suit against Anthropic, as well as against co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally. The plaintiffs allege that the AI lab waged a “brazen campaign to illegally torrent, scrape and download copyrighted works.”

The suit was filed late Friday evening in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California; it was first reported by Music Business Worldwide. The publishers speak of “naked theft”: by their account, Anthropic used thousands of protected works to train its Claude model. The company could not be reached for comment before publication.

Not the first suit

This is not the first time Anthropic has faced intellectual-property claims. Some of the lawyers behind the current suit also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a case launched in January, and they handled Bartz v. Anthropic. In that proceeding, a group of authors accused the company of using their works to train products such as Claude.

The outcome of the Bartz case proved landmark: Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion. In doing so, the court drew an important distinction — using protected works to train an AI was itself deemed lawful, but the way they were obtained, namely piracy, was not. It is precisely this line that shapes the logic of the claims.

What makes the new suit different

The current suit is built on the same arguments, but is markedly broader. The publishers stress “egregious piracy” via illegal torrenting, through which, they allege, millions of copies of books were obtained — including editions containing song lyrics and sheet music. In effect, the plaintiffs are extending the line of the earlier cases, but carrying it over to the music catalog.

Once again the dispute lays bare a question central to the industry: even if training AI on protected material is deemed permissible, companies will have to answer for exactly where that material came from. For Anthropic, which has already paid a record sum in the Bartz case, this means a new front of litigation — and a reminder that the source of the data may cost more than the fact of using it.

Source: TechCrunch