Anthropic Accused of Stealing Thousands of Songs in Music Label Suit

The music industry is once again accusing artificial intelligence giant Anthropic of intellectual property theft.

Sony Music, Warner Chappell Music and several other labels filed a federal lawsuit Friday (Aug. 28) alleging that the Claude maker improperly used “thousands upon thousands” of their songs to train the AI model.

“Defendants can no longer hide their extraordinary theft, and their mass infringement is now well-documented,” the suit said, adding that another court in the district had “recently described Anthropic’s actions as ‘straightforward piracy but at massive scale.’”

The suit, filed in in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, demands a jury trial and was first reported by the website Music Business Worldwide.

That report noted that the lawsuit means that the publishing arms of all three major music companies have taken legal action against Anthropic.

Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO sued the company in October 2023 over roughly 500 songs, and filed a second suit earlier this year. That action covers more than 20,000 works and seeks more than $3 billion.

BMG sued Anthropic in March over 493 songs, with Round Hill Music suing the company earlier this month, the report added.

In this latest suit, the record labels seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 for work willfully infringed, as well as up to $25,000 for each alleged “removal and/or alteration” of copyright management information.

Anthropic told TechCrunch it disagrees “with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.”

Anthropic last month agreed to pay a historic $1.5 billion copyright violation settlement in a case brought by authors who had accused the company of improperly using their works to train Claude. The settlement is thought to be the largest such award in a U.S. copyright case.

As PYMNTS wrote last month, the judicial record on AI copyright issues is a divided one. For example, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco called AI training “quintessentially transformative” and said copyright law “seeks to advance original works of authorship, not to protect authors against competition.”

But U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, also in San Francisco, warned in a ruling days later that widespread AI training could undermine the economic incentives that fuel human creative work.

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