MARIAH CAREY'S CHRISTMAS SONG IS NOW EXHIBIT A IN A BILLION-DOLLAR AI SUIT

🚨 Up to $150,000 per song. Across at least 20,000 compositions.

Guardian Business reports that Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have sued Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, over the alleged misuse of "tens of thousands" of copyrighted musical works.

The suit was filed in a California court on 28 August and names Anthropic, chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann. It was first reported by trade publication Music Business Worldwide.

📉 The allegation: that lyrics were obtained by "torrenting, scraping and downloading", used to train the Claude models, and then reproduced back to users in responses to prompts.

The songs named include Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You, Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Survivor's Eye of the Tiger, Bon Jovi's Livin' on a Prayer, Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, Mark Ronson's Uptown Funk and Katy Perry's California Gurls.

The publishers also claim Mann and Anthropic downloaded at least 7 million copies of books from pirate websites. Those figures come from a separate authors' copyright case that Anthropic settled for $1.5bn.

A further claim: that identifying information was stripped from the texts, denying owners "valuable attribution". That carries a demand of $25,000 for each removal or alteration, on top of the $150,000 per work.

The plaintiffs call it "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history".

Anthropic, preparing for a listing that could value it at $2tn, told TechCrunch it disagrees with the claims and intends to defend itself robustly. Nothing has been proven in court.

Should AI companies have to pay a licence fee for every song they train on?

#Anthropic #Claude #MusicBusiness #Copyright #causeanuproar