Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic for Training via Hacking

Major publishers, including Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, are suing Anthropic and its co-founders in California. They allege that Claude was trained using content acquired through illegal torrenting and reference a legal precedent involving $1.5 billion.

Plaintiffs allege use of torrents for millions of works

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and other music publishers accuse Anthropic and its co-founders of using content obtained through piracy via peer-to-peer networks to train their AI model, Claude. According to the lawsuit, millions of copies of books, some containing lyrics and sheet music, were illegally downloaded. The publishers believe that thousands of copyrighted works were used in the training of the model. They describe this new action as particularly broad and claim to rely on legal precedents.

Case filed in San Francisco and cited legal precedents

Last Friday, the lawsuit was filed in the federal court for the Northern District of California. The publishers indicate that some arguments made in this case had already been raised in other litigation, but that significant differences also exist. Among the cited precedents is the case of Bartz v. Anthropic, brought by some of the same lawyers, where Anthropic was accused of using copyrighted works to train products like Claude. In that case, a judge ruled that the use of copyrighted works was legal, but not their acquisition through piracy, and Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion. The lawyers involved also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a separate action filed in January. The current lawsuit targets Anthropic as well as its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. Anthropic could not be reached for comment before publication. The case was first reported by Music Business Worldwide.