Sony Warner Sue Anthropic Over Pirated Music for AI Training

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a major copyright lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Anthropic, alleging it engaged in mass piracy to train its Claude chatbot models. The complaint, filed on Friday, August 28, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses Anthropic and its cofounders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, of illegally acquiring and using tens of thousands of copyrighted musical compositions, lyrics, and sheet music. The lawsuit contends that Anthropic conducted a "brazen campaign" of torrenting, scraping, and downloading protected works on a massive scale. It alleges that cofounder Benjamin Mann used BitTorrent to download at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis in June 2021, and that staff later downloaded two million more from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022. The plaintiffs state that Anthropic also scraped lyrics from licensed websites in violation of their terms and purchased secondhand physical books in bulk to scan and digitize their contents, destroying the originals afterward.