Sony music and Warner chappell just sued Anthropic, with a multi-billion lawsuit, calling it ‘one of history’s biggest and most blatant ongoing intellectual property thefts.’

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell want up to $150,000 per infringed work, disclosure of Anthropic's training data and collection methods, and destruction of infringing copies.

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Some of the things, the complaint alleges

• They say that Anthropic co-founder Benjamin Mann discussed acquiring LibGen data with CEO Dario Amodei, who approved the torrenting; an earlier court found Mann knew the books were pirated.

• That the pirated LibGen and PiLiMi material still reached commercial Claude models indirectly, through synthetic data and reinforcement feedback from other Anthropic models trained on that material.

• They also accuse Anthropic of stripping copyright-identifying information from training material and rewarding accurate reproduction of copyrighted lyrics during finetuning.

• Claude finetuning included copyrighted song lyrics, with reviewers selecting accurate lyric reproductions over inaccurate ones, effectively rewarding verbatim recall.