Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic over alleged IP theft for AI training

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and a group of other music publishers have filed a lawsuit against AI company Anthropic, alleging a "brazen campaign" of intellectual property theft. The suit, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims Anthropic illegally used thousands of copyrighted works to train its AI model, Claude.

The publishers accuse Anthropic of "blatant theft" and "flagrant piracy" through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including those containing lyrics and sheet music. This legal action follows similar intellectual property cases against Anthropic, with some of the same lawyers representing plaintiffs in this new suit also involved in prior litigation.

Notably, Anthropic was previously ordered to pay $1.5 billion in the landmark Bartz v. Anthropic case, where authors accused the AI lab of using copyrighted works for training. While a judge ruled the use of copyrighted works for training was legal, acquiring that content through piracy was not.