Music publishers Sony Music and Warner Music have filed a lawsuit in California federal court against startup Anthropic, which is behind the artificial intelligence (AI) models Claude. The lawsuit accuses the technology company of misusing copyrighted songs to train the aforementioned models. This was reported by Reuters agency citing court documents.
Anthropic Faces Another Giant Lawsuit: AI Trained on Beatles and Taylor Swift Lyrics
In the lawsuit filed today, the companies stated that Anthropic unlawfully used hundreds of song lyrics and sheet music from artists such as The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson and hundreds of others to teach the model to respond to human prompts. The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal disputes that copyright holders have waged or are waging against technology companies over the unauthorized use of protected works to train AI. These have included writers, publishers, music companies and news media.
Record company Universal Music Group sued Anthropic in 2023 and again at the beginning of this year, also over the alleged use of copyrighted song lyrics in training artificial intelligence. These lawsuits are still ongoing. Last year, Anthropic became the first AI company to settle one of these disputes out of court when it paid $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit filed by a group of writers.
“Anthropic clearly views this merely as a cost of doing business, given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright infringement,” Sony and Warner stated in the lawsuit.
“And $1.5 billion is clearly not a high enough amount to deter unlawful conduct by a company that has turned such massive copyright infringement into a staggering market value of two trillion dollars,” the plaintiff companies added.
From Torrent Downloads to Czech OSA Lawsuit: Pressure on AI Training Intensifies
The lawsuit states that Anthropic illegally obtained song lyrics and sheet music from publishers through pirated downloads from so-called torrents. The company then used these to train the Claude model, which is capable of verbatim reproduction of copyrighted lyrics upon request.
Sony and Warner also stated that Anthropic used their lyrics to teach Claude “to generate vast quantities of allegedly ‘new’ AI-generated song lyrics that compete with the legitimate copyrighted works of music publishers as harmful substitutes in the market”.
Sony Music, UMG and Warner Records also sued Suno and Udio last year, which enable music generation using AI models. This was the first lawsuit against AI platforms in the music industry. According to the music publishers, both companies copied large amounts of copyrighted music without permission, on which they subsequently trained their systems. Some of these disputes ended in settlements.
The Czech Copyright Protection Association (OSA) is also preparing a lawsuit against Suno, which enables music generation using artificial intelligence (AI). OSA board chairman Roman Strejček told ČTK this. According to him, Suno uses music by authors represented by the association to train its models without permission. A recent investigative article by The Atlantic magazine revealed that companies like Suno or Udio use extensive databases containing millions of songs to train their models. In the databases published by the magazine, songs by numerous Czech and Slovak artists can be found.
Source: ČTK
