Music giants sue Anthropic: It used tens of thousands of works to train Claude

Two of the world's largest music companies are suing Anthropic and its founders, claiming that the AI company used copyrighted songs to train its models.

"This is one of the largest and most blatant cases of intellectual property theft in history," it is claimed in the lawsuit, which was filed jointly by Warner Music and Sony Music in a federal court in California on Friday.

Since modern AI services burst onto the scene with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, a large number of copyright lawsuits have been filed against companies operating in the field, with claims that the companies used protected intellectual property to train their models. Anthropic itself was sued in October 2023 by a group of music companies, including Concord and Universal Music, on the grounds that it used copyrighted song lyrics to train Claude. In June 2024, the industry organization RIAA and major music companies sued AI music generation services, claiming they used protected recordings to train models. In March of this year, BMG sued Anthropic, alleging copyright infringement of 493 works.

However, the current lawsuit is larger than the others in that it is also directed personally against the founders of Anthropic, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, and in its scope, which includes reference to tens of thousands of works, songs, and compositions that Warner and Sony claim were used by the company to train its models.

"The defendants conducted a brazen campaign to illegally download copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap huge profits from the Claude series of models," the plaintiffs claim.

According to them, Anthropic collected "thousands upon thousands" of copyrighted songs, including hits like Eye of the Tiger from Rocky III, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye, All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey, and Paper Ring by Taylor Swift. In addition, the lawsuit claims that the company downloaded copyrighted materials from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, pirate online archives that host protected works.

"Among the millions of books that the defendants downloaded from these illegal sites are books that contain the lyrics and notes of hundreds or more protected musical works," it is claimed. "These include Livin' On a Prayer, September, Great Balls of Fire, Ramblin' Man, and Hallelujah."

Thanks to these works, the plaintiffs claim, Claude is able to generate identical or near-identical copies of the protected works in response to users, and to generate song lyrics intended to compete with songs written by humans. Warner and Sony are seeking damages of up to $150,000 for each work listed in the lawsuit.