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Anthropic Sued By Sony, Warner For Allegedly Stealing Tens of Thousands of Songs, Torrenting Copyrighted Works (axios.com) 56

Posted by EditorDavid from the facing-the-music dept.
Axios reports: Some of the world's largest music publishers filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday night, alleging "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."

The suit is the opening salvo in what is now likely to be a yearslong fight over music, AI, and how intellectual property is protected in a new era of technology... The Sony/Warner lawsuit is notable because it's broad. It alleges Anthropic unlawfully trained its models off "tens of thousands" of music publishers' copyrighted compositions, whereas other lawsuits have focused on a narrower set of works. BMG's lawsuit against Anthropic, for example, claims infringement against 493 compositions.

What they're saying: "Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic's 'Claude' series of artificial intelligence ('AI') models," the plaintiffs write in the 48-page complaint. They also claim that Anthropic pirated thousands of copyrighted musical works...
More details from The Verge: The companies are asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance when identifiable copyright data was stripped. In total, the damages could amount to several billion dollars if a court finds in Sony and Warner's favor and awards the maximum amount...

The suit alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. It also claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which paid to license content from the labels.
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Anthropic Sued By Sony, Warner For Allegedly Stealing Tens of Thousands of Songs, Torrenting Copyrighted Works More

Anthropic Sued By Sony, Warner For Allegedly Stealing Tens of Thousands of Songs, Torrenting Copyrighted Works

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  • a lot to prove (Score:2, Insightful)

    by dfghjk ( 711126 )

    Downloading music could be illegal, training using illegally obtained information could also be. But you'd need to prove the illegal downloading and provide that the training materials were illegally obtained. An AI could "listen to" music that was broadcast just like humans can, it seems as though this is just another permutation of the same baseless assertion that AI training and other forms of use are inherently different.

    Of course, no one should doubt that AI companies are consuming copyrighted works

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by evanh ( 627108 )

      The fact they've targetted Anthropic alone suggests they already have the evidence of internal Anthropic comms.

      • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The fact they've targetted Anthropic alone suggests they already have the evidence of internal Anthropic comms.

        It suggests nothing of the sort.

        They may think they can discover such evidence, though.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        The fact they've targetted Anthropic alone suggests they already have the evidence of internal Anthropic comms.

        Or they found in their music and movie torrents IP addresses belonging to Anthropic. You think they've stopped monitoring torrent sites? It's just that they couldn't bring in one giant lawsuit asking for the identities of 1000 John Does and then dropping the lawsuit once they have them. They'd have to bring in 1000 individual lawsuits to identify and sue individuals and that is a lot more expensive

      • because music companys have a history sueing based on evidence on oh wait

      • Or simply that they may have been induced to continue Trumps thwarted persecution of Anthropic through other means.

      • They don't even need to do that. LLM AI produces output based on its input. LLM AI can't create. Therefore, it stands to reason that if you can get any AI to create music that contains music that can be shown to have been copied from another work and that said AI doesn't have an agreement to consume that music lawfully then it must have been consumed illegally. Not only that, the copied music (even if only a few bars) is copyright and royalties can be owed.

        What's more likely is that various bit torrent acti

      • Well Anthropic was found guilty of precisely this. In Bartz v Anthropic they just settled for $1.5bn due to piracy of books.

    • What does "listen to" in quotes mean to you? You imply that AI "listens to" music just like a human.

      Do you know how a human listens to music? If not, then presumably you can prove that AI "listens to" music in the same way as a human, even if you can't know exactly how the human or the AI does it.

      Please describe this equivalence, so we can judge the plausibility of your assertion that AI "listens to" music in the same way as a human.

      • I guess, he meant that the AI patiently waited for a song to start and finish as it was played on radio instead of processing it as a file or some database entry among others in bulk, thousands per second. Is that so hard to conclude? Or you lack inference capabilities?
      • Actually they are now thinking that our world perception isn't in the brain at all. They have mapped the whole brain and know some things about how we process thoughts but they still don't know where our feelings come from. There is no mapping in the brain for light waves to color perception. They now think that the brain is just more of an antenna. It's very interesting.

        • When you say "they," are you referring to your religious leaders?

          • No I'm referring to the top educated people in the field.

            • I don't think so. I poked around and couldn't find any support for what you were saying. What I found was that our feelings come from the limbic system, and the perception of color is produced through a multi-step process involving several different parts of the brain.

              I didn't find anything about it functioning like an antenna.

              So, if you have serious scientific research to present on this topic, please present some links.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        Listen to in quotes means that it of course means backprogagating errors through a lot of tensors which is not exactly how humans listen. So it is a analogy making things easier to understand for non-technical people.

    • An AI could "listen to" music that was broadcast just like humans can

      Do you really think that's plausible?

    • Very little to prove actually. Anthropic has lost this very lawsuit against another defendant already. They settled for $1.5bn in the previous case purely on the topic of piracy involving bittorrent: https://www.reuters.com/world/... [reuters.com]

  • How long before the labels start going after new artists that sound like existing ones?

    You know, where someone is "inspired" by a singer, a band or a songwriter that they've idolized for years and thus their own creations are heavily influenced by those artists?

    If there's a chance for a new Lambo or Porsche in the corporate car park at EMI or WMG you *know* they'll be working on such law suits right now!

    I've also wondered why there's no restriction on voice-actors who impersonate famous people -- but if you

    • That line's been blurred already.

    • Re:It's only a matter of time... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by PsychoSlashDot ( 207849 ) on Saturday August 29, 2026 @09:20PM (#66313482)

      How long before the labels start going after new artists that sound like existing ones?

      You know, where someone is "inspired" by a singer, a band or a songwriter that they've idolized for years and thus their own creations are heavily influenced by those artists?

      There's (probably) a fundamental difference, even if you want to equate AI recombination and human inspiration.

      Human artists - in theory - used legal means to hear what inspired them. Could be listening to it on broadcast radio, where the right to hear it was arranged through ads. Could be listening to it on a mix tape from a friend, which many countries have laws for. It's not assumed, suspected, or proven that the musician who cites Sting or Ozzy stole the albums they're inspired by.

      The tech bros pretty openly did exactly that.

      If there's a chance for a new Lambo or Porsche in the corporate car park at EMI or WMG you *know* they'll be working on such law suits right now!

      If they ever could've, they would've. That should tell you they couldn't, and the above is the reason, I think.

      I've also wondered why there's no restriction on voice-actors who impersonate famous people -- but if you do it with AI then you are right in the firing line.

      Almost without fail the people doing that are working within legal rights, doing parody. Comedians or sketch comics. There has been a legal carve-out for those types of activities. Even Elvis impersonators have to be very careful; their actual performance doesn't invoke legal liability but any merch or an Elvis-themed Vegas wedding facility does trigger royalties. It's very different to have a comedian performing "wouldn't it be funny if Famous Person was in this situation" than "we're making more Die Hard movies and Bruce Willis can go ahead and stop us from using his likeness if he can... oh... right... he can't... so eat a bag of dicks."

      • There's (probably) a fundamental difference, even if you want to equate AI recombination and human inspiration. Human artists - in theory - used legal means to hear what inspired them. Could be listening to it on broadcast radio, where the right to hear it was arranged through ads. Could be listening to it on a mix tape from a friend, which many countries have laws for. It's not assumed, suspected, or proven that the musician who cites Sting or Ozzy stole the albums they're inspired by.

        If you create a new song that includes riffs or music that is substantially similar to (or the same) as existing work, then there is existing case law that says you owe royalties to the original artist. This gives you some idea of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        Summary, courts have already ruled that creating new work that uses part of existing creative efforts requires compensation so any AI platform consuming commercial music, without an agreement, to create new works is open to being sued.

    • That has nothing to do with anything. In fact arguments about the sound of music dates back to the start of copyright law. This case is about piracy. AI generation and AI training have already been ruled fair use.

  • Sued? why no criminal complaints? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    They sent mothers with kids to actual jail in the 90s for downloading a few mp3s, i'am surprised there is no RICO prosecutions if its copyright infringement on an industrial scale, or maybe you CAN indeed commit crime if you put on a suit and start a LTD company, wearing a Kippa in USA gives you invincibility +9000, robbing a bank is small time, the real hustle is robbing investors and embezzling as much as you can before you hop on a plane to a middle east sh1thole with generational wealth.

  • Billions in fines, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Saturday August 29, 2026 @09:58PM (#66313524)

    ... true justice will be served when the courts order all of the copies and products based on them to be destroyed. Namely, the Claude and other Anthropic models.

    Make a public show out of this by bulldozing their data centers to accomplish this.

    • ... true justice will be served when the courts order all of the copies and products based on them to be destroyed.

      Never going to happen because there is too much money involved.

      I'll tell you exactly how this ends: a private settlement for an undisclosed amount of money.

    • Except they won't. The models themselves have been agreed to be fair use. You're allowed to train AI model on anything it is willing to see. Bartz v Anthropic ruled that training AI is fair use, and therefore the only remaining claim is how material was aquired.

      Unfortunately Bartz v Anthropic also ruled that downloading books via bittorrent is copyright infringement and that claim was settled already for $1.5bn

      We don't need to guess, or hope, what will happen. There's legal precedence for exactly this court

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jezwel ( 2451108 )

        Unfortunately Bartz v Anthropic also ruled that downloading books via bittorrent is copyright infringement and that claim was settled already for $1.5bn

        The problem here of course is that using a bittorrent client for downloading by default offers that same product up for download by other parties - and that's the copyright infringement that Anthropic are being hit with.Should've used an alternative where you download only.

  • Copyright is a gift by government which may become too troublesome to be worth the expense. Copyright expires
    (despite Disney and their puppet Sonny Bono who lived far too long considering the damage he did) after all, and could expire much sooner than later. It's an annoyance.

    If artists want money they can emulate the Grateful Dead who generated a fanatically loyal following (that long outlived the band) by encouraging taping, even off their sound boards at concerts.

  • 3... 2... 1...

    they did it with the books, why not CDs, SA-CDs and DVD-Audio?

  • what a timeline (Score:4, Insightful)

    by diffract ( 7165501 ) on Saturday August 29, 2026 @10:54PM (#66313560)
    The pinnacle of current technology rests on torrented media and unpaid creatives

    • I'm enjoying the framing of "technologists vs creatives" as if creatives didn't owe nearly all of their modem income to the technology they condemn (now).

      Put it this way: if you never record anything you make, nobody can "steal" your sales by torrenting your songs. If you only earn income from live performances, nobody can sign you to an "exploitative" streaming contract. If you digitize nothing, there's no way Claude or x or anyone can churn it into their llm. Of course, not doing these things also mean

      • what a strange way to frame this. Those creatives didn't get the technology for free, they paid sometimes fortunes for it. They also put in man-hours and skills to their craft. You think techologists have a right to torrent their work for free and profit off of it?

        • "You think techologists have a right to torrent their work for free and profit off of it?"
          To answer your specific question: Not at all. (reductio ad absurdam is one of the lazier fallacies, btw). I never even implied that. If they torrented an artists' actual work in the sense of sharing that exact work for free they absolutely should be punished to the same degree Pirate Bay or Anna's Archive is, absolutely.

          Of course, that isn't what they're doing, is it?

          I was merely commenting on your assertion that "T

          • Yes, you actually can. As an originator of the work, the copyright is yours, and YOU decide the license and terms under which you release it. If you want to prohibit their use in training LLM models, or commercial use of derivative works based on them, then you can decide so.

            Just because something is accessible without payment on the public Internet does NOT automatically imply that it's in the Public Domain. It never did, and I'm confused how the GenAI age managed to convince so many people (apart from the

  • As long as companies obtain legal access to material, I don't see the problem. Scraping? If a company puts material on the Internet, it can be seen. Scraping is not - and should never be - illegal. Torrenting is much the same: If the material is legally online, it doesn't matter how they accessed it. That assumes, of course, that they didn't seed any torrents.

    What we have here, are lawyers looking for a payout.

    • Torrenting is much the same: If the material is legally online, it doesn't matter how they accessed it.

      I'm not sure what precedence you think you're citing with there, but there's a world of precedence that is the exact opposite. Also there's a difference between personal and commercial use. Anthropic has already lost this same lawsuit against book publishers because they also torrented books.

    • Licenses exist.

      Try using the freely available preview copy of a photo from the Getty library in your next commercial project, and see how that goes.

  • Huh? (Score:2)

    by allo ( 1728082 )

    Does Anthropic have any video/audio product? I thought they are purely about text generation? OpenAI had sora and has nano banana, but Anthropic?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      From TFS:

      The suit alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. It also claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which paid to license content from the labels.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        With lyrics this makes more sense, right.
        On the other hand ... won't you expect from a "intelligent machine" that it can recite lyrics like a human could?

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