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Music publishing branches of Sony Music and Warner Music have sued artificial intelligence startup Anthropic in a California federal court, accusing the company of misusing copyrighted song compositions to train its Claude AI models, as per a Reuters report.
Sony and Warner alleged in a lawsuit filed on Friday that Anthropic pirated hundreds of song lyrics and musical compositions by artists including The Beatles, Taylor Swift and Michael Jackson to train its Claude AI models to respond to user prompts. The lawsuit is the latest in a growing wave of cases brought by copyright owners, including authors, publishers, music labels and news organizations, over the use of their work to train AI systems. Universal Music Group sued Anthropic in 2023, alleging the AI company used copyrighted song lyrics to train its models. That case remains ongoing. Anthropic last year became the first major AI company to settle one of these copyright disputes, agreeing to pay USD 1.5 billion to resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by a group of authors. "Anthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright theft," Sony and Warner said in their complaint, as reported by Reuters. "And USD 1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering USD 2-trillion-dollar valuation." The complaint alleges that Anthropic illegally obtained the publishers' song lyrics and sheet music through torrent downloads to train its Claude AI models, which can reproduce copyrighted lyrics "verbatim" when prompted. Apart from this, both the music companies also said Anthropic used their lyrics to teach Claude to "generate vast quantities of purportedly 'new' AI-generated song lyrics, which compete with Music Publishers' legitimate copyrighted works as harmful market substitutes," Reuters reported. Now, the labels are seeking damages of up to USD 150,000 for each infringed copyright, as well as a court order prohibiting Anthropic from using their works. Representatives for Anthropic, Sony Music and Warner Music did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday. (ANI)
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