Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has been hit with a copyright lawsuit filed by the major music industry following similar legal challenges from the publishing sector.

According to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on the 29th local time, major record labels Sony Music and Warner Chappell Music filed a lawsuit alleging that Anthropic used tens of thousands of lyrics and musical scores without authorization for AI training.

Alongside Anthropic as a corporate entity, Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Benjamin Mann were also named as defendants.

Both Sony and Warner claimed that Anthropic obtained pop music scores and lyrics through pirated books downloaded from illegal websites, scanned files of physical books it purchased, and data scraped in violation of terms of service from internet sites in large quantities, using them to train its AI models.

They asserted that the number of songs Anthropic used for training without authorization exceeds thousands, citing major examples such as Mariah Carey's classic holiday hit "All I Want for Christmas Is You," Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer."

In addition, they pointed out that Anthropic systematically manipulated and deleted copyright management information (CMI) to conceal the facts of copyright infringement.

As a result, they stated that when users of the AI model Claude ask questions about specific song lyrics, it mass-produces outputs that replicate the lyrics verbatim without any information regarding the original creators.

Characterizing Anthropic's actions as "one of the largest and most blatant thefts of intellectual property in history," Sony and Warner sought statutory damages of up to $150,000 (approx. 200 million won) per infringed work.

They also demanded the permanent destruction of all unauthorized lyric databases and training files held by Anthropic.

Previously, Anthropic recently settled a lawsuit regarding its use of pirated books in its AI models by agreeing to pay $1.5 billion (approx. 2 trillion won) to authors.

However, Sony and Warner criticized the company, stating, "It is clear that Anthropic simply regards (such settlement amounts) as a cost of doing business."

In response, Anthropic told the tech media outlet TechCrunch, "We disagree with their claims and plan to defend ourselves vigorously in court."

(Photo: AP, Yonhap News)