Several music publishers have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing this AI company of engaging in piracy by downloading, scraping, and bulk acquiring copyrighted works, and using thousands of these works to train Claude models. The defendants also include Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann.
The lawsuit targets the source of training data.
The plaintiffs include Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and several other music publishing companies. The complaint alleges that Anthropic launched a large-scale, systematic campaign to acquire copyrighted content, which was subsequently used for model training.
The lawsuit was filed later on Friday. The first to disclose this information was Music Business Worldwide. According to current reports, the focus of the case is not only whether copyrighted works were used, but also how these materials were obtained.
Anthropic Faces Another Copyright Litigation
This is not the first time that Anthropic has been sued in court over intellectual property issues. Previously, Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group have also filed similar cases, with some of the attorneys involved being the same as in this case.
Anthropic was also sued by a group of authors in the case of Bartz v. Anthropic. The plaintiffs accused the company of using copyrighted works to train products such as Claude.
Precedent influences the outcome of new cases
In the case of Bartz, the court made a notable ruling: it was deemed legal for AI to use copyrighted works to train models, but if the content source involved piracy, it was not permitted. As a result, Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in compensation.
This background makes the focus of the dispute in the new case more centered on the method of content acquisition, rather than just the training behavior itself. If the plaintiff can prove that Anthropic established training corpora through illegal downloading or other means, the pressure on the case may further increase.
As of the time of this report, Anthropic has not responded to requests for comments.
