Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Anthropic, the startup behind the Claude AI chatbot, in California federal court. The music publishers, who manage copyrights for songwriters and composers, allege that the company misused tens of thousands of copyrighted song compositions to train its AI models.
According to the lawsuit, Anthropic pirated hundreds of lyrics from high-profile artists, including The Beatles, Taylor Swift, and Michael Jackson. The plaintiffs argue that the company sought a vast back catalogue of songs without paying for them.
Anthropic has responded to the legal action by claiming that the lawyers are recycling allegations from cases already before the court.