Major Music Labels Sue Anthropic Over Misuse Of "Tens Of Thousands" Of Copyrighted Songs

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, two major music publishers, have taken legal action against artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic, The Guardian reported. The publishers, who manage the copyright of songs on behalf of songwriters and composers, sought damages from the AI firm for alleged misuse of "tens of thousands" of copyrighted works.

The multibillion-dollar lawsuit was filed in a California court against Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, and also targeted co-founder Benjamin Mann. The legal action accuses the company of unlawfully scraping, downloading, and using copyrighted songs to train its flagship AI assistant, Claude.

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The lawsuit claims that Anthropic obtained protected musical compositions without permission or payment, and besides training its models, Claude can output exact or near-exact song lyrics when prompted. This, according to the lawsuit, directly undercuts licensed lyric platforms and deprives songwriters and publishers of earned royalties.

According to the report, the compositions include Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You, Ain't No Mountain High Enough, originally performed by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and Survivor's Eye of the Tiger.

The plaintiffs noted that they are victims of "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history".

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"Defendants specifically elected to harvest unauthorized copies of Music Publishers' works so that they would not have to pay Music Publishers a licensing fee to use their works in AI training and development," the plaintiffs said as quoted by the media outlet.

The publishers are demanding a jury trial and maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per infringed work, which could aggregate into billions of dollars in potential penalties. As per the lawsuit, at least 20,000 works are involved.