Sony and Warner sue Anthropic over alleged music copyright infringement

Two major music publishers, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, have jointly filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging the “largest and most blatant ongoing theft of intellectual property in history.”

According to reports from Engadget on Saturday (29/8), the lawsuit was filed on Friday (28/8) in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division. Both publishers accuse Anthropic of being responsible for a “blatant campaign to illegally download via torrent (peer-to-peer file sharing), perform scraping (data extraction), and download copyrighted works on a massive scale” to train its Claude artificial intelligence (AI) model.

The two music publishers are requesting a jury trial. They are also seeking damages of up to US$150,000 (approximately Rp2.66 billion) for each infringed work, as well as US$25,000 (approximately Rp444 million) for each instance where Anthropic removed copyright management information.

Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group are seeking damages exceeding US$3 billion (approximately Rp53.28 trillion) through their respective lawsuits.

Anthropic is also facing other copyright lawsuits, this time from a group of authors alleging that the company used pirated copies of their copyrighted works to train its AI models. Anthropic subsequently settled that matter through a deal worth US$1.5 billion (approximately Rp26.64 trillion), which stands as one of the largest copyright settlements ever recorded.