One of the biggest (and most understandable) complaints that we’ve seen about generative AI is that since it’s trained on actual human creations, there’s a large grey area regarding the legalities of content made from such software. With that in mind, music publishers Sony Music and Warner Chappell Music have sued AI developer Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, for allegedly scraping and torrenting copyrighted music on a massive scale to train the Claude AI models.
Both Sony Music and Warner Chappell Music refer to the issue at hand as blatant intellectual property theft, and allege that Anthropic systematically harvested and copied protected works to build its business. Unsurprisingly, the complaint is just one example of a growing wave of copyright lawsuits from authors and news organizations against AI platforms and developers, with accusations bordering on piracy.
Anthropic’s infringing acts inflict substantial harm on Music Publishers in multiple ways, including by depriving Music Publishers of licenses fees, undermining potential and existing licensing markets for Music Publishers’ lyrics, and lowering the overall value of Music Publishers’ works.
According to the plaintiffs, Anthropic treats massive legal penalties – such as a prior $1.5 billion settlement over book copying – as merely the cost of doing business rather than a real deterrent. As a result, the publishers now demand full discovery rights to expose the exact scale of the data harvesting, in addition to $150,000 for every “willfully infringed work” and an additional $25,000 for each instance where Anthropic removed copyright management information.
