“Zlibrary my beloved”: Anthropic staff chats extolling piracy cited in Sony suit

Some of the world’s leading music publishers think that Anthropic got off too light in a historic settlement where the Claude maker paid authors $1.5 billion after admitting to pirating more than 7 million books to train AI.

“$1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation,” music publishers said in a lawsuit filed Friday.

Music publishers suing Anthropic include Sony, EMI, and Warner Chappell. They alleged that Anthropic’s illegal torrenting also included “thousands upon thousands” of their copyrighted musical compositions.

Songwriters who are increasingly competing with AI-generated works in music charts are harmed by that piracy, their complaint said.

Pirated books that Anthropic allegedly plans to keep “forever” to train AI include titles featuring the complete works of the Beatles, Taylor Swift’s “best” songs, and “VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of Rock & Roll.” Without an injunction ending the improper AI training, Anthropic will continue to violate music copyrights—while improperly substituting artists in their markets by reproducing song lyrics verbatim and by generating “new” songs that mimic the “heart” of their most popular works, publishers alleged. For example, Anthropic may rely on songbooks or sheet music to respond to prompts asking Claude to change Eminem lyrics into a song written in “Beyonce’s style.”

“It’s a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits,” music publishers alleged.

Sony resurfaces Anthropic staff chats

Anthropic’s “mass campaign of illegal torrenting” began in July 2021, when Anthropic co-founder Benjamin Mann “personally used BitTorrent to unlawfully download and upload via torrenting millions of pirated books” from Library Genesis (LibGen), a controversial pirate library. Dario Amodei, Anthropic co-founder and CEO, allegedly approved the torrenting, and both he and Mann are named individually as defendants in music publishers’ lawsuit.