Sony Music and Warner Bros. File Lawsuit Against Anthropic, Claiming “Flagrant” Intellectual Property Theft
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and several other music publishers have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, claiming the AI company engaged in a “flagrant campaign of illegally downloading, scraping, and torrenting copyrighted materials.”
The lawsuit was submitted late Friday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, as initially reported by Music Business Worldwide. The publishers accuse Anthropic of “outright theft” by utilizing thousands of copyrighted materials to develop its AI system, Claude.
As of the time of this article’s publication, Anthropic has not responded to requests for comments. Any updates regarding their statement will be incorporated into this article.
This is not the first time Anthropic has faced legal challenges regarding intellectual property. Some of the attorneys involved in this case also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a lawsuit filed earlier this year and have been part of the Bartz v. Anthropic case, where a group of authors claimed that Anthropic used their copyrighted work to train products like Claude. In a landmark ruling in the Bartz case, Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion after a judge determined that, although using copyrighted content may be legal, obtaining it through piracy is not.
While these cases raise similar issues, they also highlight important distinctions. The current lawsuit is notably extensive and builds upon previous cases by accusing Anthropic of “blatant piracy” through the illegal downloading of millions of books, including those with lyrics and musical scores.
