Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic over torrenting, naming Amodei and Mann personally

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The two publishers filed August 28 in the Northern District of California, naming Anthropic plus co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, over what they call a 'brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale.' They seek up to $150,000 per infringed work across tens of thousands of compositions, plus $25,000 for each instance of stripped copyright management information. Unlike the 2023 lyrics-output suit, this one targets the acquisition of training data itself, putting the piracy-sourcing question rather than model output at the center.