Sony, Warner Music sue Anthropic over songs used in AI training

By Blake Brittain

Aug. 31 (Reuters) - The music publishing branches of Sony Music 6758.T and Warner Music WMG.O have sued Anthropic in California federal court for allegedly misusing their copyrighted song compositions to train its Claude AI models.

Sony and Warner said in the complaint, filed on Friday, that Anthropic pirated hundreds of song lyrics and sheet music from The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson and hundreds of other artists to train Claude to respond to human prompts.

The lawsuit is the latest in a wave of cases brought against tech companies by copyright owners including authors, publishers, music labels and news outlets over the use of their work to train AI systems. Universal Music Group UMG.AS sued Anthropic in 2023 over the alleged use of copyrighted song lyrics in AI training, in a lawsuit that is still ongoing.

Anthropic became the first AI company to settle one of the disputes last year, when it paid $1.5 billion to resolve a class action from a group of authors.

"Anthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright theft," Sony and Warner said in their complaint. "And $1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation."

Spokespeople for Anthropic, Sony Music and Warner Music did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.

The complaint alleges Anthropic illegally obtained the publishers' lyrics and sheet music through torrent downloads to train Claude, and that Claude can reproduce copyrighted lyrics "verbatim" when prompted.

Sony and Warner also said Anthropic used their lyrics to teach Claude to "generate vast quantities of purportedly 'new' AI-generated song lyrics, which compete with Music Publishers’ legitimate copyrighted works as harmful market substitutes."

The labels are seeking damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed copyright and a court order barring Anthropic from using their works.