All AI wants for Christmas is a vast catalog of songs without paying for it, according to a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the startup behind chatbot Claude. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, music publishers who manage song copyrights on behalf of songwriters and songwriters, are seeking damages for Anthropic’s alleged misuse of “tens of thousands” of copyrighted works. Compositions include All I Want for Christmas is You, Ain’t No Mountain High by Mariah Carey. Enough, originally performed by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and Eye of the Tiger from Survivor. The plaintiffs claim they are victims of “one of the largest and most egregious ongoing intellectual property thefts in history.” The lawsuit, filed in a California court, targets Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amodei, as well as co-founder Benjamin Mann. It alleges that the defendants violated copyright law by “torrenting, scraping, and downloading” lyrics from copyrighted works to train their family of Claude AI models, as well as by reproducing those lyrics in response to user prompts. It claims Mann and Anthropic downloaded at least 7 million copies of books from pirate websites, including lyrics and sheet music to songs like Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. The figures come from a recent copyright case against Anthropic brought by American authors that the company settled for $1.5 billion. The lawsuit, filed Aug. 28, was first reported by trade publication Music Business Worldwide. Other songs that allegedly had their copyrights infringed included Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson and California Gurls by Katy Perry. It also claims that Anthropic acquired copies of songs in other ways, including scraping lyrics from legal sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind, and data sets on archive sites like Common Crawl. In another section of the lawsuit, the publishers allege that Anthropic removed identifying information from the songs while processing the texts, denying copyright owners “valuable attribution” to their work. “Defendants specifically chose to collect unauthorized copies of Music Publishers’ works so that they would not have to pay them a licensing fee to use their works in AI training and development,” the plaintiffs said. to $150,000 per infringed work and $25,000 for each deletion or alteration of identifying data. The lawsuit implies that at least 20,000 works are involved in the lawsuit, referring to the illegal copying of “tens of thousands of copyrighted musical compositions from Music Publishers.” Every weekdaySign up for Business TodayGet ready for the business day – we’ll give you all the business news and analysis you need each morning after the newsletter promotion. Ed Newton-Rex, a UK-based composer and campaigner to protect artists’ copyrights, said he was “not surprised” that rights holders were fighting back against a company with a “history of downloading and training its AI models in huge libraries.” In addition to the authors’ lawsuit, Anthropic has also faced lawsuits from Universal Music Group and Concord Music. Group. In a separate case this month, AI music generator Suno lost a copyright infringement case against German licensing agency GEMA, which alleged illegal use of songs, including Boney M’s Daddy Cool, to train its technology. A spokesman for Anthropic, which is preparing for a public listing that could value the company at $2 trillion, said: “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and intend to defend ourselves vigorously in court.”
