Sony, Warner join forces to sue Anthropic, accusing Claude of infringing copyright on thousands of songs

"One of the largest and most blatant intellectual property thefts in history." This is what Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music accuse Anthropic of in their latest lawsuit. Two music publishing groups jointly filed a lawsuit on Friday, accusing Anthropic of long-term "large-scale illegal torrent downloading, crawling and expropriation of copyrighted works" in order to train the Claude series AI model. The full text of the complaint was obtained by Music Business Worldwide and made public.

The two publishers requested a jury trial and proposed specific compensation standards: a maximum of $150,000 for each infringed work, and an additional $25,000 for each time Anthropic removes the copyright management information of the work. The complaint alleges that the number of musical works that have been illegally collected and trained reaches "thousands and tens of thousands." If calculated based on this, the final amount of compensation may accumulate to billions of dollars.

This is not the first time Anthropic has been sued in court this year over the source of its training materials. Earlier, Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group had filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing it of illegally downloading more than 20,000 copyrighted songs for AI training, seeking more than $3 billion in damages. Going back further, a group of writers also sued Anthropic for using pirated books to train models, and the case ended with a record $1.5 billion settlement.

Judging from this timeline, the music and publishing industry’s pursuit of the source of Anthropic’s training materials is not a single incident, but a series of lawsuits. Engadget has asked Anthropic for confirmation on this lawsuit, but has not yet received a response as of press time.