Sony accuses Anthropic of copying its music for Claude AI training; AI giant could pay up to $150,000 per song

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, two music giants, have reportedly filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing it of copyright and intellectual-property theft. According to a Business Insider report, the companies are potentially seeking billions of dollars in damages. The music publishers are using very strong language in their complaint, accusing Anthropic of being responsible for one of the largest and most blatant ongoing cases of intellectual-property theft in history.

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Why did Sony accuse Anthropic? 

The lawsuit was filed on August 28 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The companies also directly name Anthropic CEO and cofounder Dario Amodei and cofounder Benjamin Mann in the lawsuit. In the lawsuit, the music companies accuse Anthropic of a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale” to train its AI models.

The music publishers also claim that Anthropic made huge profits from music that it allegedly used without permission. Now, it is demanding $150,000 in damages for each copyrighted work and $25,000 for each copyright violation. Now, the company is saying that Anthropic used thousands of songs, for which the compensation could reach billions of dollars.

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The publishers also mentioned the names of songs, such as Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, All I Want for Christmas Is You, Eye of the Tiger, and Here Comes Santa Claus, which are copyrighted musical works, and Sony and Warner are essentially saying Anthropic used these works without the necessary permission or licensing.

This is not the first lawsuit for Anthropic for using copyrighted material to train its AI models. Earlier this year, Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with book publishers after being accused of using copyrighted books to train its AI models without permission.

Universal Music Group (UMG), the world's largest music company, along with Concord Music Group and ABKCO Music, sued Anthropic over alleged copyright infringement. Now, their latest lawsuit is seeking more than $3 billion in damages.