Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic and its co-founders, alleging the company engaged in a "brazen campaign" of illegally downloading and scraping copyrighted music to train its AI model Claude.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims Anthropic used thousands of copyrighted works without permission, including songs with lyrics and sheet music. The publishers describe the practice as "blatant theft" and accuse the AI lab of "flagrant piracy" through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books.
This isn't Anthropic's first legal battle over intellectual property. The company was previously ordered to pay $1.5 billion in the Bartz v. Anthropic case after a judge ruled it illegally acquired copyrighted content through piracy, even if using copyrighted works for training was deemed legal.
