Kathmandu— Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic in United States federal court, alleging that the company pirated hundreds of song lyrics from artists like The Beatles, Taylor Swift, and Michael Jackson to train its Claude artificial intelligence (AI) models. Filed on Friday, the lawsuit claims that Anthropic illegally obtained these copyrighted works through torrent downloads to enhance its AI capabilities.

Lawsuit Details

The complaint filed by Sony and Warner alleges that Anthropic used pirated song lyrics and sheet music from hundreds of artists, including The Beatles, Taylor Swift, and Michael Jackson, to train Claude. According to the lawsuit, this training allows Claude to reproduce copyrighted lyrics verbatim when prompted and generate new AI-generated song lyrics that compete with legitimate works.

Previous Legal Battles

This lawsuit is part of a broader trend where copyright owners are suing tech companies over the use of their work in AI training. In 2023, Universal Music Group sued Anthropic for similar reasons, and those cases remain ongoing. Anthropic previously settled a class action lawsuit from authors by paying $1.5 billion last year.

Anthropic's Response

An Anthropic spokesperson responded to the allegations on Monday, stating that this is the third lawsuit with recycled claims and that the company will defend itself robustly. The spokesperson also argued that AI training makes fair use of copyrighted material, citing a judge from an earlier case against authors.

(With inputs from Al Jazeera)

Originally published on abcnews.com.np.