The artificial intelligence (AI) corporations Anthropic are facing a copyright dispute that has spilled into the music industry.
On the 29th (local time), according to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, record labels Sony Music and Warner Chappell Music filed a lawsuit alleging that Anthropic unlawfully used tens of thousands of lyrics and scores to train AI.
Not only the Anthropic entity but also Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann were named as defendants.
Sony and Warner said Anthropic obtained pop music scores and lyrics through pirated books downloaded from illicit sites, files scanned from physical books it purchased, and data mass-scraped (crawled) from websites in violation of terms of service, and used them to train AI models.
The record labels said the number of affected songs reaches into the thousands. As representative examples, they cited Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You," Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and Bon Chobi's "Livin' on a Prayer."
They also alleged that Anthropic systematically manipulated or deleted copyright management information (CMI) to conceal the fact of illegal copying. Because of this, they said, when a user of the AI model Claude asks for the lyrics of a particular song, the lyrics are output verbatim without original author information.
Sony and Warner characterized Anthropic's actions as "the largest and most brazen theft of intellectual property in history," and sought damages of up to $150,000 (about 200 million won) per infringed song. They also demanded the permanent destruction of all illegally copied lyric databases and training files in Anthropic's possession.
Earlier, Anthropic recently finalized a settlement to pay authors $1.5 billion (about 2 trillion won) over the use of pirated books in its AI models.
Sony and Warner criticized this, saying, "It is clear that Anthropic views (such settlement payments) simply as an expense for business operations."
In response, Anthropic told the information technology (IT) outlet TechCrunch, "We do not agree with their claims and plan to vigorously defend ourselves in court."