Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and several other music publishers have filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Anthropic, accusing the firm of unlawfully obtaining and using copyrighted material to train its AI systems.

The legal action also names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The publishers allege that the company engaged in widespread copyright violations by obtaining protected works through illegal downloading, torrenting and data scraping.

According to the lawsuit, thousands of copyrighted materials were allegedly used in developing Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence model without proper authorisation.

Anthropic has rejected the allegations and said it intends to defend itself in court. The case adds to the growing number of legal disputes involving AI companies and copyright owners, as publishers, authors, musicians and other content creators seek clarity over how their intellectual property can be used to train artificial intelligence systems.

The lawsuit follows earlier copyright-related cases involving Anthropic. In a previous dispute involving authors, the company faced major financial consequences after questions were raised over the methods used to obtain copyrighted books for AI training.

Legal experts have increasingly focused not only on whether AI training itself is permissible but also on how the material used for training was acquired.

The latest case could become another significant test for the AI industry. Its outcome may influence how technology companies obtain training data and could establish further legal boundaries around the use of copyrighted creative works in artificial intelligence development.

Source: Techcrunch