A group of major music publishers is taking Anthropic to court, arguing that the company’s landmark EUR 1 billion settlement with book authors was too small to discourage future infringement. In a lawsuit filed Friday, publishers including Sony, EMI, and Warner Chappell accused the Claude maker of illegally downloading thousands of copyrighted musical compositions to train its artificial intelligence.
The complaint frames the earlier payout as inadequate. “EUR 1 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering EUR 2-trillion-dollar valuation,” the publishers wrote. That settlement resolved claims that Anthropic pirated more than 7 million books to develop its AI systems.
According to the publishers, Anthropic’s illegal torrenting swept up “thousands upon thousands” of protected songs. They argue that songwriters, who increasingly compete with AI-generated tracks on music charts, are directly harmed by the practice.
What the Publishers Are Claiming
The pirated material that Anthropic allegedly intends to keep “forever” for AI training reportedly includes titles covering the complete works of the Beatles, a collection of Taylor Swift’s best songs, and “VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of Rock & Roll.” Without a court injunction, the publishers argue, Anthropic will keep violating music copyrights by reproducing lyrics word for word and by generating new songs that imitate the core of popular works.
As one example, the lawsuit suggests Anthropic could draw on songbooks or sheet music so that Claude responds to prompts such as rewriting Eminem lyrics in “Beyonce’s style.” The publishers characterized the conduct as “a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits.”
Internal Staff Chats Cited as Evidence
The complaint traces the alleged activity back to July 2021, when Anthropic co-founder Benjamin Mann is said to have “personally used BitTorrent to unlawfully download and upload via torrenting millions of pirated books” from Library Genesis (LibGen). CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei allegedly approved the effort, and both men are named individually as defendants.
By the end of 2021, the FBI had shut down LibGen, but the complaint notes that online pirates copied its contents to form a new library called Z-Library. After that too was taken offline, internal messages surfaced in the earlier authors’ case showed Anthropic obtained a copy through the Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi).
Mann is accused of directing staff to torrent PiLiMi soon after it appeared, telling colleagues the mirror had dropped “just in time!” One employee replied, “zlibrary my beloved.” Publishers cited those exchanges as evidence that the company embraced piracy to quickly gather training data.
The lawsuit states that crawling the non-confidential catalogs of LibGen and PiLiMi revealed bibliographic metadata such as title,
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Image: arstechnica.com
