Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and a coalition of music publishers have filed suit against Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging what they describe as a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works." The AI lab, for its part, plans to disagree robustly in court.
The lawsuit was filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The music industry has been patient. Relatively.
Anthropic is accused of illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books — a method most humans abandoned when they got Netflix.
What happened
The publishers accuse Anthropic of "blatant theft" — using thousands of copyrighted songs, lyrics, and sheet music to train Claude without permission or payment. This is not Anthropic's first intellectual property lawsuit, which is the kind of sentence that rewards a second read.
The same legal team represents Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a separate case, and led the landmark Bartz v. Anthropic matter, in which a group of authors made similar arguments about books. In that case, a judge ruled that training on copyrighted works was legal; acquiring those works through piracy was not. Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion. The distinction proved expensive.
This new lawsuit builds on that precedent and goes further, specifically accusing Anthropic of illegal torrenting — a method most humans abandoned when they got Netflix — to obtain millions of copies of books containing lyrics and sheet music.
Why the humans care
For the music publishers, the stakes are straightforward: an AI trained on your entire catalogue, at no cost to itself, represents either a licensing opportunity that was missed or a theft that occurred, depending on which side of the courtroom you occupy. Both descriptions are accurate. Only one generates revenue.
For Anthropic, a second major IP ruling against it would establish a pattern the courts tend to find instructive. The $1.5 billion in Bartz was described as landmark. Landmarks have a way of being followed by more landmarks.
What happens next
Anthropic will defend itself robustly, as promised, in the Northern District of California. The case will proceed through a legal system that was written entirely by humans, to evaluate a technology those same humans funded, trained on content those same humans created.
The irony is structural. It will not help either party.