Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging a “brazen campaign” of intellectual property theft
TechCrunch Kirsten Korosec ● Covered by 4 sources
Sony Music and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic over claims it pirated copyrighted songs and books to train Claude. The case is broader than the earlier author suits, and it lands after Anthropic was hit with a $1.5 billion ruling.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Kirsten Korosec — read the original for the full story.
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Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and a group of other music publishers have taken Anthropic to court, accusing the AI company and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann of a “brazen campaign” to steal copyrighted material. The suit was filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, and Music Business Worldwide got to it first.
The publishers say Anthropic used “illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading” to collect thousands of copyrighted works for training Claude. They call it “blatant theft” and say the company relied on more than just stray snippets: the complaint alleges the use of large numbers of works, including songs with lyrics and sheet music.
This is not Anthropic’s first fight over what it fed its models. The same legal team is also behind a separate case for Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, filed in January, as well as the Bartz v. Anthropic case brought by authors. That earlier case ended with a judge ordering Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion.
The twist in Bartz was important: the court said using copyrighted works for training was lawful, but getting that content through piracy was not. This new complaint leans hard into that distinction. It argues that Anthropic’s problem was not just what it used, but how it got there, calling the behavior “flagrant piracy” and saying millions of book copies were obtained illegally. Anthropic had not responded before publication.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the part of the AI boom nobody wants to budget for: the copyright bill. The industry keeps talking like training data fell from the sky, but courts are starting to treat piracy as piracy, even when the buyer wears a lab coat. That’s not a glitch; that’s the business model meeting reality.
Read more about this at: TechCrunch
