Anthropic sued over alleged theft of ‘tens of thousands’ of songs

All AI wants for Christmas is a vast back catalogue of songs without paying for it, according to a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the startup behind the Claude chatbot.

The compositions include Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, originally performed by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger.

The plaintiffs claim they are victims of “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history”.

It claims that Mann and Anthropic downloaded at least 7m copies of books from pirate websites, including the lyrics and sheet music to songs such as Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

“Defendants specifically elected to harvest unauthorized copies of Music Publishers’ works so that they would not have to pay Music Publishers a licensing fee to use their works in AI training and development,” said the plaintiffs.

The music publishers are seeking damages that could run into billions of dollars, based on a claim of up to $150,000 per infringed piece of work and $25,000 for each removal or alteration of identifying data.

Alongside the authors’ lawsuit, Anthropic has also faced claims from Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group.

A spokesperson for Anthropic, which is preparing for a stockmarket listing that could value the company at $2tn, said: “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.”