Sony Music, Warner Sue Anthropic Over Alleged Copyright Piracy

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and numerous other music publishers have sued Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The publishers allege Anthropic conducted a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works.” The complaint accuses the AI lab of using thousands of copyrighted works to train its AI model Claude.

The lawsuit was filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. TechCrunch says the case was first reported by Music Business Worldwide. The article describes the lawsuit as particularly broad and focused on accusations of illegal piracy.

An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch: “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.” That response signals the company plans to contest the allegations rather than seek an immediate retreat. For readers tracking AI and copyright, the next key question is how the court treats the alleged method of acquiring training material.

This is not the first intellectual property lawsuit Anthropic has faced, according to TechCrunch. The article notes related litigation involving Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, as well as the Bartz v. Anthropic case brought by authors over copyrighted works used to train products like Claude. In the Bartz case, Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion after a judge ruled that using copyrighted works was legal, but acquiring that content through piracy was not. The latest complaint builds on those disputes by alleging “flagrant piracy” through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including books containing lyrics and sheet music.