Sony, Warner Music sue Anthropic, saying it pirated songs to train its AI

The music publishing branches of Sony Music and Warner Music have sued Anthropic in United States federal court in California for allegedly misusing their copyrighted song compositions to train its Claude AI models.

Sony and Warner said in the complaint , filed on Friday, that Anthropic pirated hundreds of song lyrics and sheet music from The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson and hundreds of other artists to train Claude to respond to human prompts.

The lawsuit is the latest in a wave of cases brought against tech companies by copyright owners, including authors, publishers, music labels and news outlets, over the use of their work to train artificial intelligence systems. Universal Music Group sued Anthropic in 2023 and this year over the alleged use of copyrighted song lyrics in AI training in lawsuits that are still ongoing.

Anthropic became the first AI company to settle one of the disputes last year when it paid $1.5bn to resolve a class action from a group of authors.

“Anthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright theft,” Sony and Warner said in their complaint. “And $1.5bn is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering 2-trillion-dollar valuation.”

“This is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts,” an Anthropic spokesperson said on Monday. The spokesperson also said the company will defend itself “robustly” and AI training makes fair use of copyrighted material, citing the judge in the authors’ case against it.

Spokespeople and an attorney for Sony Music and Warner Music did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.

The complaint alleges Anthropic illegally obtained the publishers’ lyrics and sheet music through torrent downloads to train Claude and Claude can reproduce copyrighted lyrics “verbatim” when prompted.