Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging a “brazen campaign” of intellectual property theft

A coalition of major music publishers, including Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, has launched a significant legal challenge against Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses the AI startup of orchestrating a systematic effort to misappropriate copyrighted material.

Allegations of Systematic Piracy

The plaintiffs contend that Anthropic engaged in a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading” protected works to facilitate the training of its Claude AI model. The publishers characterize these actions as “blatant theft,” marking a major escalation in the ongoing tension between the creative industries and generative AI developers.

"The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of 'flagrant piracy' through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including those that contain lyrics and sheet music."

A Growing Legal Pattern

This litigation follows a series of similar intellectual property disputes involving the same legal counsel. Previous high-profile cases include:

• Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group: A January filing challenging AI training practices.
• Bartz v. Anthropic: A landmark case where authors successfully argued that while AI training might be permissible, the acquisition of data via piracy is not.

In the Bartz case, Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion after a judge determined that the company’s methods for sourcing content were unlawful.

While Anthropic has yet to provide a formal statement regarding these new allegations, the industry is watching closely. This latest filing is notably broader than its predecessors, aiming to hold the firm accountable for the specific methods used to ingest vast quantities of copyrighted lyrics and sheet music.