Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over piracy claims

In short: Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and other music publishers sued Anthropic, claiming it illegally downloaded copyrighted works to train its Claude AI.

What happened

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and other music publishers filed a lawsuit against Anthropic and two of its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The case was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The publishers claim Anthropic ran a “brazen campaign” of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works. Torrenting is a common way to share files online, and it is often linked to piracy (like copying and trading movies or music without paying). Scraping means pulling large amounts of content from websites automatically, like using a tool to copy many pages at once.

The lawsuit says Anthropic used thousands of copyrighted works to train Claude. Training an AI model is like teaching it by showing it many examples, so it learns patterns and can generate similar text later.

Why it matters

This case adds to a growing legal fight over what AI companies can use to train their systems, and how they get that material. A key point in earlier cases involving Anthropic was not just whether copyrighted content could be used for training, but whether the company obtained it legally. In one prior author lawsuit, a judge ruled it could be legal to use copyrighted works for training, but not legal to get them through piracy, and the case ended with a $1.5 billion payment approved by a court.

Anthropic did not comment before publication, according to TechCrunch.

Source: TechCrunch AI