Major music publishers Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music last week joined the Anthropic litigation party, suing not only the AI company for copyright infringement, but also two of its founders, Ben Mann and Dario Amodei.
Both execs, the publishers claim, were personally involved in the illegal downloading of millions of pirated books, including books containing sheet music and lyrics, in order to build a dataset to train the company's Claude AI model.
Mann “personally used BitTorrent to unlawfully download and upload via torrenting millions of pirated books” the publishers say in their new lawsuit. And both Mann and Amodei “expressly directed other Anthropic employees to do the same”. Without the two founders’ “direction and approval”, the lawsuit adds, “none of the foregoing torrenting activity would have occurred”.
By pirating all those copyright-protected works and then making additional copies as part of the Claude training process, Anthropic and its two founders are “behind one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history”, the publishers insist.
Sony and Warner are pretty late to the Anthropic litigation party, rival publishers Universal Music Publishing, Concord and ABKCO having filed a lawsuit against the AI company all the way back in October 2023. BMG then launched its own legal action in March this year, and Round Hill - another late comer - filed its lawsuit last month.
The latest Anthropic litigation joins a mounting pile of lawsuits filed by record labels, music publishers and independent music creators against AI companies, including Suno and Udio as well as Anthropic. A new Suno lawsuit was also filed last week, while Udio made another filing with the court in its legal battling with the Sony record company.
Because there have been so many music industry lawsuits against AI companies in the US - not to mention the dozens more filed by other copyright owning industries - the allegations made by Sony and Warner against Anthropic are all pretty familiar.
Though copyright lawsuits against AI companies have evolved since 2023 - mainly in response to early judgements in other AI copyright cases - and the new Sony and Warner lawsuit reflects that.
In particular the fact the new lawsuit leads with the piracy allegations, and claims that Anthropic began its AI training with a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale”.
AI companies continue to argue that AI training is ‘fair use’ under US copyright law, which means they don’t need to get permission from copyright owners like music publishers when making copies of their existing works as part of the AI training process.
When a group of book authors sued Anthropic, the judge actually accepted the fair use defence, but said it only applied if an AI company began the process with legitimately sourced copies. But, as Sony and Warner point out in their lawsuit, Anthropic initially built its training dataset by pirating millions of ebooks. Which is why the AI company subsequently agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with the authors.
In another case involving a different group of authors and Meta, another judge accepted Meta’s fair use defence. But he also said the authors could have defeated it if they’d done a better job of showing that new content generated by Meta’s AI model was diluting the market for the books that had been copied as part of the training process.
So, unsurprisingly, Sony and Warner’s lawsuit also has a section talking about market dilution. “By training its models with copies of music publishers’ lyrics”, it says, “Anthropic teaches its Claude models how to generate vast quantities of purportedly ‘new’ AI-generated song lyrics, which compete with music publishers’ legitimate copyrighted works as harmful market substitutes”.
Elsewhere in the world of music AI lawsuits, a US-based company that specialises in regional Mexican music, Gerencia 360 Music, has sued Suno for copyright infringement. It joins Universal Music, Sony Music, Round Hill and various indie artists in suing the AI company, which does have some deals in place with the music industry, including Warner Music and BMG.
The new lawsuit argues that music controlled by Gerencia 360 Music has played a crucial role in the training of Suno’s AI model, helping it to generate Spanish language songs. “Without its infringement of Gerencia’s Spanish language copyrighted works”, the legal filing states, “Suno would not have been well-positioned to capture a significant share of the Spanish language AI user market”.
Although Suno rival Udio has more licensing deals in place with the music industry, it is also still fighting some lawsuits. Including two from Sony Music, which filed a second lawsuit in July in a bid to hold the AI company liable for infringing the copyright in many more recordings controlled by the major - 30,442 recordings in fact - so that it can seek a much higher damages pay out if it wins the copyright case.
Udio formally responded to that second lawsuit last week, again insisting that any copying it did of Sony’s recordings constitutes fair use of that music - “quintessential fair use” in fact. It then also argues that Sony has acted anticompetitively, and as a result its copyright claims should be barred on the basis of “copyright misuse and unclean hands”.