GoKawiilis the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.
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Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed suit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California seeking damages for “tens of thousands” copyrighted works. The companies are asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance when identifiable copyright data was stripped. In total, the damages could amount to several billion dollars if a court finds in Sony and Warner’s favor and awards the maximum amount.
In addition to suing Anthropic as an entity, the complaint names Co-Founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. The suit alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. It also claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which paid to license content from the labels.
According to the filing:
Plaintiff Music Publishers, a group of the world’s leading music publishers, bring this action to hold accountable the culprits behind one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history. Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s “Claude” series of artificial intelligence (“AI”) models.
Specific songs named as being found in Anthropic’s training data include Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On a Prayer,” Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and TaylorSwift’s “Paper Rings.” Antrhopic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.