Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a major copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The music publishers allege that Anthropic engaged in massive, illegal torrenting, scraping, and downloading of copyrighted works—including songs, books, and lyrics—to train its Claude AI models. The suit claims statutory damages of up to $150,000 per copyrighted work and up to $25,000 per instance of removed copyright metadata, potentially totaling several billion dollars.
The complaint contains specific, grave allegations, including claims that co-founder Benjamin Mann downloaded over five million pirated books via BitTorrent and that employees acquired two million more from shadow libraries. The filing also alleges that Anthropic scraped lyrics from third-party sites to avoid paying licensing fees to rights holders. This lawsuit follows a series of high-profile legal challenges faced by Anthropic, including a recent $1.5 billion settlement with book publishers, alongside active litigation from Universal Music Group and other major labels.
If the plaintiffs succeed, the case could set a severe financial precedent for AI companies using unlicensed proprietary material for model training. The inclusion of co-founders as individual defendants also marks an escalating legal strategy targeting corporate leadership directly, potentially reshaping liability considerations across the generative AI sector.
Why it matters
Founders face rising personal liability risks as lawsuits increasingly target individual executives alongside corporate entities for training data acquisition practices.
Licensing costs and potential copyright judgments present significant, high-billion-dollar liabilities for companies training frontier models on un-permissioned web data.
Source: theverge.com
