Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over AI training data
Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in federal court in California, accusing the company of using tens of thousands of copyrighted songs and lyrics to train its Claude AI models without permission. The complaint names Anthropic's co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann individually, alleging they pirated millions of books via BitTorrent and scraped lyrics from licensed sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind. The publishers are seeking damages that could total billions of dollars if courts award the maximum penalties per work.
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This case adds to a growing wave of copyright litigation against AI companies, testing whether scraping and torrenting copyrighted material for model training constitutes fair use or outright infringement. A ruling against Anthropic could set a costly precedent for the entire AI industry, forcing companies to license training data rather than freely harvest it from the web.
- Sony Music and Warner Chappell are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work, potentially totaling billions in damages.
- The lawsuit personally names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging direct involvement in piracy.
- The case adds pressure on AI firms industry-wide regarding how they source and license training data.
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Published there as: “Sony Music and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic”
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