Anthropic Faces Multi-Billion Dollar Lawsuit Over Alleged Piracy

Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing AI lab Anthropic of conducting one of the largest intellectual property thefts in history, according to reporting from The Verge and TechCrunch.

The complaint targets Anthropic as an entity as well as co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The plaintiffs allege the company used illegal torrenting and scraping to obtain copyrighted works to train its "Claude" AI models. Specifically, The Verge reports that the suit alleges Benjamin Mann used BitTorrent to download more than five million pirated books, while other employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. The lawsuit also claims Anthropic scraped lyrics from LyricFind and MusixMatch.

Sony and Warner are seeking damages for "tens of thousands" of works, requesting up to $150,000 per work and $25,000 for each instance of stripped copyright data. The Verge notes that maximum awards could total several billion dollars. Specific songs cited in the training data include Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings," Bon Jovi's "Livin' On a Prayer," and Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

This litigation follows a series of legal challenges for the lab. TechCrunch reports that Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in the Bartz v. Anthropic case after a judge ruled that while using copyrighted works is legal, acquiring that content through piracy is not. Anthropic has also faced lawsuits from BMG, Round Hill Music, Concord, ABKCO, and Universal Music Group. Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.