Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic for Copyright Infringement

Global music giants Sony and Warner have sued Anthropic, accusing the AI company of committing one of the largest and most blatant intellectual property thefts in history. The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic illegally used tens of thousands of copyrighted musical works to train its models. Anthropic and its founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, are accused of recklessly downloading, scraping, and distributing copyrighted works on a massive scale to develop and operate the company's Claude series of AI models and reap huge profits.

The record labels are seeking up to $150,000 in damages for each infringed work, plus an additional $25,000 for each instance where identifiable copyright information was removed. If the court rules in favor of the record labels and awards the maximum damages, the total compensation could reach billions of dollars. The lawsuit also accuses Mann of using BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, while Anthropic employees downloaded more than two million pirated books from the Pirate Library Mirror website and scraped lyrics from sites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind, which pay to obtain authorization from the record labels.