Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic for Piracy: the First Time It Cost 1.5 Billion, Now the Sheet Music Is Next

Music publishers Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, together with several other houses, have filed suit against Anthropic and against its two co-founders personally - Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The complaint is written without diplomatic decoration: a "shameless campaign of illegal torrenting, scraping and downloading of copyrighted works". The suit was filed late on Friday before the District Court for Northern California.

Anthropic responded with a sentence that is very nearly a template: "We disagree with the publishers' claims and intend to defend ourselves vigorously in court." Neither confirmation nor denial of any specific fact - just an announcement that there will be lawyers.

This is not the first time. Some of the same attorneys running this suit also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in proceedings opened in January, and the same team ran Bartz v. Anthropic - the case in which a group of authors claimed their books had been used to train the Claude model. That case ended with 1.5 billion dollars in damages.

The Bartz ruling drew a line worth understanding, because the whole industry is now working around it: the court found that using copyrighted works to train a model is legal. What is not legal is how the material was obtained. Anthropic did not pay because it learned from the books - it paid because it pirated them.

The new suit pushes that same logic further. The publishers claim that millions of copies of books were collected via torrents, among them works containing song lyrics and sheet music. If the first case was about a library, this one is about a music archive.

It is worth noting what is not in dispute here. Nobody is still trying to prove the machine is not allowed to read. The argument has narrowed to procurement: was the material bought, or was it downloaded. That is a question every accountant understands better than any engineer, and that is precisely why it is dangerous for the companies - you need no expertise in neural networks to work out how many copies somebody downloaded and at what price.

Anthropic is currently a company whose estimated value is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, and 1.5 billion for piracy is paid out of an account like that almost as a cost of doing business. The question is whether that is exactly the point - whether the penalty works like a parking ticket: unpleasant, but calculable.

For a Balkan reader the story has a recognisable shape. The material is taken first, permission is sought once the lawsuit starts, and in the end a sum gets paid that the payer can live with. The difference is that here the plaintiffs are two of the largest music houses in the world, with lawyers who have already won this exact fight once. Whether the second trial will cost more than the first - that is the only question Anthropic is actually counting.