"Dr. Amodei expressly directed, approved, controlled, and intentionally induced these infringements by Mr. Mann and other Anthropic employees," the 48-page complaint:https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/74720572/1/sony-music-publishing-us-llc-v-anthropic-pbc/ states. The plaintiffs call it "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." Ad
The company also allegedly scraped song lyrics from licensed platforms like MusixMatch and LyricFind without publisher consent, violating those platforms' terms of service. The complaint challenges Anthropic's use of datasets like Books3, The Pile, and Common Crawl, which allegedly contain unauthorized content. It also accuses the company of scanning and destroying used songbooks and sheet music collections.
The plaintiffs also go after how Anthropic handled torrented content during training. Anthropic has publicly denied using LibGen and PiLiMi books directly to train commercial Claude models, but the complaint argues that denial depends on how Anthropic defines "training." Ad
The plaintiffs allege Anthropic trained at least one commercial Claude model on synthetic data generated by a non-commercial model that had itself learned from LibGen and PiLiMi texts. They also claim Anthropic used such a model to provide reinforcement feedback to a commercial Claude model. The full scope of these claims will come out during discovery. Ad
Stay in the loop on AI. Clear, useful, no fluff.
Follow The Decoder for AI news, background stories and expert analyses.