Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging a "brazen campaign" of intellectual property theft | TechCrunch

A coalition of major music publishing entities, including Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, has initiated a significant copyright infringement lawsuit against the artificial intelligence developer Anthropic and its founders.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the legal complaint alleges that the technology firm engaged in a widespread and unauthorized campaign of downloading, torrenting, and scraping copyrighted compositions to train its Claude generative models. The publishers argue that Anthropic's methods constitute a direct theft of intellectual property, bypassing legal licensing channels in order to build its proprietary systems.\n\nThis new litigation represents an escalation in the ongoing legal challenges facing Anthropic over its training data collection practices. The company was previously hit with a substantial one-point-five billion dollar judgment in a separate lawsuit brought by a group of authors, where a judge determined that obtaining training data from pirated sources was unlawful. The music publishers' current lawsuit builds on these prior legal arguments, specifically accusing the AI startup of utilizing illegal torrenting networks to acquire millions of written works, sheet music, and song lyrics to further refine its commercial software.