Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and a chorus of other music publishers have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, accusing the AI lab of a 'brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works.' The suit, filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims Anthropic engaged in 'blatant theft' by using thousands of copyrighted works - including those containing lyrics and sheet music - to train its AI model Claude.

Anthropic, for its part, issued the corporate equivalent of 'nuh-uh' - a spokesperson stated, 'We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.' Because, as we all know, the best defense is a good offense, especially when you've already been hit with a $1.5 billion verdict.

This isn't Anthropic's first rodeo in the IP infringement corral. Some of the same lawyers behind this suit also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a case filed in January, and they led the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which authors accused Anthropic of using copyrighted works to train Claude. In that landmark case, a judge ruled that while it's legal to use copyrighted works for training, it's decidedly not legal to acquire them through piracy - a distinction that cost Anthropic $1.5 billion.

While the cases share similar arguments, this new lawsuit is notably broader, building on previous claims and specifically accusing Anthropic of 'flagrant piracy' through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including those containing lyrics and sheet music. Because apparently, when you're an AI company, 'borrowing' isn't just for library books anymore - it's for the entire library, downloaded via BitTorrent, with a side of sheet music.