Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging a “brazen campaign” of intellectual property theft

Music publishers have sued an AI lab, accusing it of illegally obtaining copyrighted musical works to train its AI model. The lawsuit alleges the company conducted illegal torrenting, scraping, and downloading of thousands of copyrighted works. This is not the company's first intellectual property lawsuit, as similar cases have been filed by authors and other music groups, with one previous case resulting in a court order to pay damages after a judge determined the company obtained content through piracy. The latest lawsuit is described as particularly broad and builds on arguments from previous cases by specifically accusing the company of flagrant piracy through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books including those containing lyrics and sheet music.