Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Take Legal Action Against Anthropic

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have initiated legal action against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking damages for “tens of thousands” of copyrighted works. The companies are pursuing up to $150,000 for each work, along with an additional $25,000 for every instance where identifiable copyright information was removed. If the court rules in favor of Sony and Warner, the total damages could reach several billion dollars.

This lawsuit adds to a series of high-profile legal challenges faced by Anthropic, which recently settled a $1.5 billion lawsuit from the publishing sector. The company has also been targeted by multiple lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO, as well as separate actions from BMG and Round Hill Music.

The complaint not only targets Anthropic as a company but also names Co-Founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. It alleges that Mann utilized BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, while employees reportedly downloaded at least two million additional works from Pirate Library Mirror. Furthermore, the suit claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from platforms like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which have paid to license content from the music labels.

According to the filing:
> Plaintiff Music Publishers, a group of the world’s leading music publishers, bring this action to hold accountable the culprits behind one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history. Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s “Claude” series of artificial intelligence (“AI”) models.

Specific songs cited as being included in Anthropic’s training data are Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On a Prayer,” Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.” Anthropic has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Update August 30th: A clarification has been made that the lawsuit was specifically filed by Sony Music Publishing, distinguishing it from Sony Music Entertainment.