Sony And Warner Sue Anthropic For ‘Blatant Violation’ Of Copyright Law

Two major music publishing groups have jointly filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the company of “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed the complaint, which can be seen in full thanks to Music Business Worldwide, on Friday and said that Anthropic was responsible for a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale” for the sake of training its Claude AI models.

The two music publishers are seeking a jury trial, but also up to $150,000 for each infringed work and $25,000 for each instance of Anthropic removing copyright management information. That could amount to billions in damages, considering the complaint alleges that “thousands upon thousands of music publishers’ copyrighted musical compositions,” were illegally harvested to train Claude models. We reached out to Anthropic for comment on the lawsuit and will update the story when we hear back.

Earlier this year, two other prominent music publishing companies sued Anthropic, accusing it of illegally downloading more than 20,000 copyrighted songs for AI training purposes. Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group were seeking more than $3 billion in damages with the lawsuit. Previously, Anthropic was hit with another copyright lawsuit, but from a group of authors who claimed that the company used pirated copies of their protected works to train its AI models. Anthropic ended up settling that case for a record-setting $1.5 billion.