The financial and tech press are abuzz with talk of AI firm Anthropic’s upcoming “mega-IPO”. It could happen as soon as late September or early October and smash the record set earlier this year when SpaceX raised $86bn by going public.
So far, the copyright-infringement lawsuits filed against Anthropic by publishers including Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord, Abkco, BMG and Round Hill Music haven’t put a notable spoke in the wheels of this process.
Will Sony Music and Warner Chappell joining the fray change this? That’s unclear, but they have entered the battle with gusto: a joint lawsuit filed last Friday (28 August) in California accusing Anthropic of infringing “tens of thousands” of their works in the training of its Claude LLM.
MBW has the filing, which draws carefully on findings during previous cases: notably the Bartz v Anthropic case brought by a group of book authors – which ultimately ended with a $1.5bn settlement.
While Sony Music and Warner Chappell’s filing focused on e-books allegedly downloaded from pirate libraries by Anthropic to train Claude, they also accuse it of scraping music lyrics from Musixmatch and LyricFind, and of reproducing some of their lyrics when prompted by users.
With statutory damages of up to $150k per infringed work in all the publishing cases, Anthropic is facing a potentially huge damages bill – IF it were to lose the cases. Even if it were to settle them all, the cost would surely dwarf the authors’ settlement. Although that would be dwarfed in turn by the funds raised by going public.
Sony Music and Warner Chappell’s lawsuits now – and Round Hill’s just before them – feel like an attempt to exert maximum leverage (or just ensure they don’t miss out) if Anthropic moves to clear its legal slate of multi-billion-dollar copyright liabilities before the IPO.
Related Stories