Publishers sue Anthropic over AI training data, seeking billions

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed a federal lawsuit against Anthropic in California, seeking potentially billions in damages for allegedly using tens of thousands of copyrighted works to train Anthropic’s Claude AI, with damages up to $150,000 per work and $25,000 for each instance where copyright data was stripped. The complaint also names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, accusing Mann of using BitTorrent to download millions of pirated books and alleging that employees scraped lyrics from licensed sites; songs cited include Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, Livin’ On a Prayer, September, Hallelujah, and Paper Rings.