Sony and Warner sue Anthropic for 'blatant violation' of copyright law - Engadget

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a joint lawsuit against Anthropic accusing the company of violating copyright law. The complaint, made public via Music Business Worldwide, was submitted on Friday and describes what the publishers call “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts” of intellectual property. They allege Anthropic carried out a “brazen campaign” of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works at massive scale to train its Claude AI models. The publishers are seeking a jury trial and damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work and $25,000 per instance of removing copyright management information. They also cite potential billions in damages, alleging “thousands upon thousands” of musical compositions were harvested. Earlier this year, Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group sued for more than $3 billion after claiming Anthropic downloaded over 20,000 songs for training; that dispute ended in a $1.5 billion settlement.