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

"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."

"This is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts," an Anthropic spokesperson said on Monday. The spokesperson also said that the company will defend itself "robustly" and that AI training makes fair use of copyrighted material, citing the judge in the authors' case against it.

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."