AI company faces multi-billion dollar lawsuit over misuse of copyrighted songs to train Claude models
All AI wants for Christmas is a vast back catalogue of songs without paying for it, according to a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the startup behind the Claude chatbot.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, music publishers who manage the copyright of songs on behalf of songwriters and composers, are seeking damages for alleged misuse of “tens of thousands” of copyrighted works by Anthropic.
The compositions include Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, originally performed by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger.
The plaintiffs claim they are victims of “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history”.
The lawsuit, filed in a California court, targets Anthropic and its chief executive, Dario Amodei, as well as co-founder Benjamin Mann. It alleges the defendants breached copyright law by “torrenting, scraping and downloading” lyrics from copyrighted works to train its family of Claude AI models – as well as reproducing those lyrics in responses to users’ prompts.
It claims that Mann and Anthropic downloaded at least 7 million copies of books from pirate websites, including the lyrics and sheet music to songs such as Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
The figures are from a recent copyright case against Anthropic brought by US authors which the company settled for $1.5bn.
The lawsuit , filed on 28 August, was first reported by trade publication Music Business Worldwide.
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