Anthropic Accused of Pirating Songbooks for AI Training

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, claiming that the company downloaded unlicensed copies of songbooks from torrent sites to train its AI model, Claude.

The suit alleges that Anthropic used BitTorrent to download around 5 million books from Library Genesis in June 2021 and another 2 million from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022. The publishers claim that these collections included sheet music and songbooks, which were then fed into Claude for training.

The lawsuit also mentions that Anthropic scraped lyrics from Musixmatch and LyricFind without permission, paying nothing for the right to display them.