Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and a group of other music publishers filed a lawsuit against Anthropic and its co‑founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works” used to train the AI model Claude. The complaint was filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Allegations and scope
The publishers accuse Anthropic of using thousands of copyrighted works and of acquiring millions of copies of books through what the complaint describes as flagrant piracy, including books that contain song lyrics and sheet music. The suit says the lab obtained material via illegal torrenting and large‑scale scraping, then incorporated that content into its training data for Claude.
The filing names Anthropic and its founders as defendants and characterizes the conduct as deliberate acquisition of copyrighted content rather than lawful licensing. The complaint seeks remedies under U.S. copyright law and other applicable statutes cited by the plaintiffs.
Related litigation and legal findings
Some of the same lawyers involved in this complaint represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a separate case filed in January. Those attorneys also led the Bartz v. Anthropic litigation, in which a court ordered Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion. In Bartz, a judge ruled that while using copyrighted works in model training can be lawful, acquiring those works through piracy is not.
The new suit says it builds on prior cases and expands allegations of illegal acquisition to a broader set of copyrighted materials in the music and publishing industries. The complaint was first reported by Music Business Worldwide.
The filing lists specific categories of allegedly misused works and names the defendants involved, but does not, at this stage, allege that the defendants obtained licenses for the material in question. The case will proceed in the Northern District of California under the docket filed on the date indicated in the complaint.
Original source: TechCrunch AI