Music publishers have claimed Anthropic’s models ‘scraped’ smash hits including Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You.
The compositions include Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, originally performed by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger.
The plaintiffs claim they are victims of “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history”.
The lawsuit, filed in a California court, targets Anthropic and its chief executive, Dario Amodei, as well as co-founder Benjamin Mann.
It claims that Mann and Anthropic downloaded at least 7 million copies of books from pirate websites, including the lyrics and sheet music to songs such as Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
The lawsuit, filed on 28 August, was first reported by trade publication Music Business Worldwide.
It also claims that Anthropic acquired copies of songs in other ways including scraping lyrics from legal sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind, and datasets on archive sites like Common Crawl.
“Defendants specifically elected to harvest unauthorized copies of Music Publishers’ works so that they would not have to pay Music Publishers a licensing fee to use their works in AI training and development,” said the plaintiffs.
The music publishers are seeking damages that could run into billions of dollars, based on a claim of up to $150,000 per infringed piece of work and $25,000 for each removal or alteration of identifying data.
Alongside the authors’ lawsuit, Anthropic has also faced claims from Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group.
Anthropic, which is preparing for a stockmarket listing that could value the company at $2tn, has been approached for comment.
It told tech website TechCrunch: “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.” Explore more on these topicsMusic industry Anthropic AI (artificial intelligence) news Share Reuse this content
