Working about three years slower than the fastest copyright strikers in the West, Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music have decided to stop letting Anthropic’s AI models train on their copyrighted music. The two publishing arms of the industry giants have sued Anthropic, a company it accuses of “parlaying mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation.” Anthropic, the suit claims, used its suite of rip-off-ready products to ingest the music of The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey, and more, to produce near-identical counterfeits and, in some cases, exact replications. UMG sued Anthropic in 2023 on similar grounds, and earlier this year, they escalated their suit to a $3 billion joint suit with Concord Music Group and ABKCO Music.
Ironically, allegedly, and relatably, Anthropic downloaded the publishers’ lyrics and sheet music through torrent sites. After procuring the Michael Jackson songbook off the Pirate Bay or whereever lazy tech companies looking to create a simulacrum of others people’s hard work go to download torrents, Anthropic used the materials to train its flagship AI, Claude, which famously and proudly advertises itself as a more ethical and legally compliant AI company compared to big, scary, evil OpenAI, which has allegedly spent much of the last few years convincing teens to kill themselves and their classmates. It seems Anthropic has failed to live up to the sincere poetic names for its Claude models (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, and Fable). This company respects the literary arts so much that, last month, Anthropic was reportedly caught “destructively scan[ning]” millions of books for its Project Panama effort. Focusing on the vague designation of “less common” titles, the company uploaded the works and destroyed them.
This could actually have some modicum of impact on Anthropic’s heretofore unstoppable business of stealing. Last year, Anthropic settled a landmark $1.5 billion class action suit filed by authors who accused the company of training Claude on their work. It was the “largest copyright recovery in history,” breaking down to about $3,000 per work. Sony and Warner are going even higher, saying, “$1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter” Anthropic from continuing its classy pump-and-pulp business model. That’s probably because the judge in last year’s settlement determined months earlier that the AI-industry’s practices are “exceedingly transformative” and therefore fall under fair use. Sony and Warner aren’t buying it, claiming Claude “generate[s] vast quantities of purportedly ‘new’ AI-generated song lyrics, which compete with Music Publishers’ legitimate copyrighted works as harmful market substitutes.” All that AI training is already cutting into the slowly collapsing record industry, which can’t afford to give up chart spots to Tyga or whatever the fuck Fenix Flexin is.
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