Several music publishers have sued Anthropic in the U.S. Federal District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing AI of obtaining copyright-protected works through pirated downloads, captures and batches, and of using thousands of works to train Claude models. The defendants also included Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, co-founders of Anthropic.

Prosecution points to training data sources

The plaintiffs included Sony Music Publishing, Warna Chappelle and several other music publishing institutions. The complaint states that Anthropic initiated a large-scale, systematic acquisition of copyright content, and that the works were subsequently used for modelling training.

This action was filed later on Friday. The first to disclose this was Music Business Worldside. According to existing reports, the focus of the case is not only on whether copyrighted works are used, but also on how these are obtained.

Anthropic faced another copyright suit

This is not the first time that Anthropic has been brought before a court for intellectual property issues. A similar case had previously been brought by Concord Music Group and Globe Music, and some of the lawyers represented were the same as in the present case.

Anthropic was also prosecuted by the group of authors in the Bartz v. Anthropic case. The plaintiff accused the company of using copyright-protected works to train products such as Claude.

Existing jurisprudence affects the direction of new cases

In Bartz, the court had made a concerned finding that the training model for the use of copyright works by AI had itself been found to be lawful but was not allowed if the source of the content was involved in pirated acquisition. Anthropic was thus awarded $1.5 billion.

This background has increased the focus of the contentious points in the new case on the means of obtaining content, not just on the training conduct itself. The pressure on the case may rise further if the plaintiff can prove that Anthropic has created a training language, including through illegal downloads.

At the time of the publication of the report, Anthropic had not responded to the request for comment.