Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed suit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, calling it "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." The companies are seeking up to $150,000 per copyrighted work, plus $25,000 for each instance of stripped copyright data — damages that could total billions.
The complaint names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. It alleges Mann used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. The suit also claims Anthropic scraped lyrics from licensed sites including MusixMatch and LyricFind.
Specific songs identified in Anthropic's training data include Marvin Gaye's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Bon Jovi's "Livin' On a Prayer," Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings."
This is the latest in a string of copyright suits against Anthropic, which recently settled with the publishing industry for $1.5 billion. The company also faces lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music.
