Sony Music and Warner Music have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging the AI company improperly used copyrighted songs to train its Claude AI models.
Sony Music and Warner Music have initiated legal action against Anthropic in a federal court in California, claiming that the AI firm misappropriated their copyrighted song compositions to develop its Claude AI models.
The lawsuit, filed on Friday, accuses Anthropic of pirating hundreds of song lyrics and sheet music from prominent artists, including The Beatles, Taylor Swift, and Michael Jackson, to enhance Claude’s ability to respond to human prompts.
According to the complaint, Anthropic allegedly acquired lyrics and sheet music through various piracy sources, such as Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror. The lawsuit further contends that the company scraped content from licensed lyric websites, including Musixmatch and LyricFind, using this material as training data for Claude.
“In blatant violation of copyright law, Defendants have unlawfully acquired troves of Music Publishers’ musical compositions, and then systematically copied those works multiple times,” the filing states. It emphasizes that these works were used both as inputs to train Anthropic’s Claude AI models and in the outputs generated by those models.
The complaint highlights that scraping and distributing content from Musixmatch breaches the site’s user agreement, while LyricFind’s privacy policy similarly prohibits reproduction “unless otherwise stated.”
Sony and Warner are pursuing statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each song that the court determines Anthropic willfully infringed. Additionally, they are seeking up to $25,000 for each instance where copyright-management information was allegedly removed from a work.
With the complaint encompassing at least “thousands if not tens of thousands” of works, the potential damages could reach into the billions of dollars.
Among the songs cited in the lawsuit are Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings” and “Cruel Summer.”
In response to the allegations, Anthropic has denied any wrongdoing, stating that the company will “defend ourselves robustly” in court. An Anthropic spokesperson remarked, “This is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts,” according to a report by Fortune.
The law firm Oppenheim and Zebrak, representing Sony and Warner in this latest suit, previously filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in October 2023 alongside Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO, concerning approximately 500 songs. A second lawsuit was filed in January, covering over 20,000 works and seeking more than $3 billion in damages. Additionally, BMG and Round Hill Music have also taken legal action against Anthropic regarding music this year.
This lawsuit emerges amid growing scrutiny of AI companies over alleged copyright infringements. Earlier in 2023, a U.S. federal court approved a landmark $1.5 billion settlement in a copyright dispute involving authors and publishers against Anthropic, who accused the AI company of misusing their books to train Claude.
The ongoing legal battles highlight the complex intersection of artificial intelligence and copyright law, raising important questions about the use of creative works in AI training processes.
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