Anthropic has been hit with a copyright lawsuit filed by major record labels, widening the legal battle over whether the data used to train artificial intelligence models was lawfully obtained.
Sony Music and Warner Chappell Music recently sued the AI company, alleging it used the lyrics and sheet music of tens of thousands of songs to train its models without permission, according to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on the 29th. The complaint names not only Anthropic as a corporation but also Chief Executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.
Sony and Warner alleged that Anthropic obtained pop music lyrics and sheet music from pirated books downloaded from illegal sites, from physical books it purchased and scanned, and from data collected in bulk in violation of website terms of service, and then used the material to train its AI models. They said thousands of songs were used without authorization, citing Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You," Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" as leading examples.
The two labels described the conduct as the largest and most brazen theft of intellectual property in history. They are seeking up to $150,000 in damages for each song copied without permission and demanding that Anthropic permanently destroy its database of illegally copied lyrics along with all files used for training.
Anthropic recently finalized a settlement to pay $1.5 billion in a separate lawsuit brought by authors who said the company used pirated books to train its AI. Sony and Warner said it was clear that Anthropic viewed such payments as nothing more than a cost of doing business.
Anthropic told the technology news outlet TechCrunch that it disagreed with the claims and would defend itself vigorously in court.
