Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and several other music publishers have sued Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, accusing the AI company of engaging in a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works.”

The lawsuit was filed late Friday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and was first reported by Music Business Worldwide.

The publishers allege that Anthropic committed “blatant theft” by using thousands of copyrighted works to train its Claude AI model.

“We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court,” an Anthropic spokesperson stated, according to TechCrunch.

Anthropic has faced intellectual property litigation before. Several lawyers involved in the latest lawsuit also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a case filed in January.

The same legal team previously led the Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit, in which a group of authors accused the AI company of using copyrighted material to train Claude and other products.

In the landmark Bartz case, Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion after a judge ruled that while the company’s use of copyrighted works for AI training was lawful, obtaining those works through piracy was not.

Although the cases raise similar arguments, there are important differences.

The latest lawsuit is broader in scope and builds on claims made in the earlier cases, accusing Anthropic of “flagrant piracy” by allegedly using illegal torrents to obtain millions of copies of books, including publications containing song lyrics and sheet music.