Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have jointly sued Anthropic, accusing the company of 'one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.' The lawsuit alleges Anthropic engaged in a 'brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale' to train its Claude AI models. The publishers seek a jury trial and up to $150,000 for each infringed work and $25,000 for each instance of copyright management information removal, potentially totaling billions in damages given the claim of 'thousands upon thousands' of illegally harvested compositions. This follows similar lawsuits earlier this year by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, which sought over $3 billion in damages for allegedly downloading more than 20,000 copyrighted songs.

Anthropic previously settled a copyright case with authors for a record $1.5 billion over the use of pirated works in AI training.