Sony and Warner sue Anthropic over alleged music downloads

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic on Friday. The publishers allege Anthropic used BitTorrent to download songbooks and train Claude. Anthropic has admitted torrenting books, but has not conceded that the files contained music. The complaint identifies about 5 million books from Library Genesis in June 2021. The complaint identifies another 2 million books from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022. The publishers say those collections contained sheet music and songbooks. The publishers also allege Anthropic scraped lyrics from Musixmatch and LyricFind. The two sites pay for the right to display the lyrics. The publishers seek up to $150,000 for each song that a jury finds Anthropic knowingly infringed. The publishers say hundreds of their songs were in the files. The publishers put the wider training claim in the tens of thousands. The filing contains four counts. Two counts concern BitTorrent's uploading of files during downloads. Those counts name Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individuals. Anthropic previously defeated the publishers' 2023 attempt to block Claude's training over lyrics. Anthropic agreed in that case to use output guardrails. Anthropic has not commented on the new lawsuit. Discovery will examine whether the songs reached Claude through a purchase or through a torrent swarm.