Major music publishers sue Anthropic over alleged piracy

Some of the world’s largest music publishers are taking AI giant Anthropic to court over an alleged piracy operation that would make LimeWire blush.

Units of Sony Music and Warner Music filed a federal lawsuit late Friday accusing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann of illegally downloading massive amounts of copyrighted works to train the company’s Claude AI models.

The scale is notable: The publishers allege Anthropic unlawfully trained its models using “tens of thousands” of copyrighted musical compositions via a “brazen campaign” of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading songs.

The plaintiffs are seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for each composition that was allegedly infringed (totaling billions of dollars).

It likely isn’t the last AI music copyright suit

Music copyright is more complicated than hitting “Accept all” on Spotify’s terms and conditions. A single song can contain several separately owned copyrights—composition, lyrics, sound recording, etc.—which can belong to different artists, publishers, and labels.

• Under this structure, AI companies could be facing multiple copyright claims for the same song.
• Commercially released songs can also qualify for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work without copyright holders having to prove any specific financial losses.

Zoom out: Sony and Warner’s case against Anthropic is significantly broader than previous AI lawsuits within the music industry, and could rival Anthropic’s $1.5 billion deal with authors and publishers last September that marked the largest copyright settlement in US history.