A new legal challenge puts Anthropic’s training methods under scrutiny, with music companies pointing to a trail that reaches far beyond ordinary licensing disputes.
Music publishers Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and other companies have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, as well as the lab’s co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
As stated by Techcrunch
The lawsuit was filed late Friday, August 28. The publishers allege that the company illegally downloaded, collected, and distributed copyrighted materials using torrent networks.
Plaintiffs allege thousands of works were used to train AI
According to the music companies, Anthropic used thousands of copyrighted works to train its Claude artificial intelligence model. The lawsuit states that the company allegedly obtained millions of copies of books, including collections of song lyrics and sheet music publications.
The plaintiffs described these actions as a brazen campaign of illegal downloading through torrent networks, collecting, and acquiring copyrighted works. In their view, this amounts to the misappropriation of intellectual property.
Anthropic has previously faced copyright lawsuits
The new lawsuit is not the first claim against Anthropic over the use of content to train artificial intelligence. Authors and music companies have previously sued the lab.
In the Bartz v. Anthropic case, the court ordered the company to pay $1.5 billion. The court found the use of copyrighted works to train models permissible, but ruled that obtaining such content through piracy was unlawful.
At the time the lawsuit was filed, Anthropic had not commented on the new allegations.