Anthropic, the startup behind the Claude chatbot, faces a multibillion-dollar lawsuit from music publishers Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell over the alleged misuse of “tens of thousands” of copyrighted songs to train its AI models.
The lawsuit, filed in a California court, claims the company “torrenting, scraping and downloading” lyrics from copyrighted works without permission. The compositions cited include Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, originally performed by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger.
Allegations of mass copyright infringement
The plaintiffs describe the alleged actions as “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history”. The lawsuit targets Anthropic, its chief executive Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann. It alleges that Mann and Anthropic downloaded at least 7 million copies of books from pirate websites, including lyrics and sheet music to songs such as Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
The figures are drawn from a recent copyright case against Anthropic brought by US authors, which the company settled for $1.5bn. Other songs allegedly infringed include Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk and Katy Perry’s California Gurls.
Acquisition methods and damages sought
The publishers also claim Anthropic scraped lyrics from legal sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind, and datasets on archive sites like Common Crawl. The lawsuit further alleges that Anthropic stripped identifying information from songs while processing texts, denying copyright owners “valuable attribution” to their work.
The plaintiffs are seeking damages that could run into billions of dollars, based on a claim of up to $150,000 per infringed work and $25,000 for each removal or alteration of identifying data. The suit implies at least 20,000 works are involved, referring to the unlawful copying of “tens of thousands of Music Publishers’ copyrighted musical compositions”.
Industry reaction and other cases
Ed Newton-Rex, a UK-based composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said he was “not surprised” that rights holders were defending themselves against a company with a “history of downloading and training their AI models on huge libraries”.
Anthropic has also faced claims from Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group. In a separate case this month, AI music generator Suno lost a copyright infringement case against German licensing agency GEMA, which alleged illegal use of songs including Boney M’s Daddy Cool to train its technology.
Anthropic, which is preparing for a stockmarket listing that could value the company at $2tn, told TechCrunch: “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.”
