“Zlibrary my beloved”: Anthropic staff chats extolling piracy cited in Sony suit

Stealing songbooks

Lawsuit: Anthropic’s torrenting totally screwed songwriters as AI songs top charts.

Some of the world’s leading music publishers think that Anthropic got off too light in a historic settlement where the Claude maker paid authors $1.5 billion after admitting to pirating more than 7 million books to train AI.

“$1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation,” music publishers said in a lawsuit filed Friday.

Music publishers suing Anthropic include Sony, EMI, and Warner Chappell. They alleged that Anthropic’s illegal torrenting also included “thousands upon thousands” of their copyrighted musical compositions.

Songwriters who are increasingly competing with AI-generated works in music charts are harmed by that piracy, their complaint said.

Pirated books that Anthropic allegedly plans to keep “forever” to train AI include titles featuring the complete works of the Beatles, Taylor Swift’s “best” songs, and “VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of Rock & Roll.” Without an injunction ending the improper AI training, Anthropic will continue to violate music copyrights—while improperly substituting artists in their markets by reproducing song lyrics verbatim and by generating “new” songs that mimic the “heart” of their most popular works, publishers alleged. For example, Anthropic may rely on songbooks or sheet music to respond to prompts asking Claude to change Eminem lyrics into a song written in “Beyonce’s style.”

“It’s a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits,” music publishers alleged.

Sony resurfaces Anthropic staff chats

Anthropic’s “mass campaign of illegal torrenting” began in July 2021, when Anthropic co-founder Benjamin Mann “personally used BitTorrent to unlawfully download and upload via torrenting millions of pirated books” from Library Genesis (LibGen), a controversial pirate library. Dario Amodei, Anthropic co-founder and CEO, allegedly approved the torrenting, and both he and Mann are named individually as defendants in music publishers’ lawsuit.

By the end of 2021, though, the FBI had shut down LibGen, the complaint noted, “but not before online pirates copied its contents to create a new library,” named “Z-Library.” And although Z-Library also got shut down quickly, internal messages revealed in the book authors’ fight showed that Anthropic got access to a copy of the copy through the “Pirate Library Mirror” (PiLiMi), the lawsuit said.

Mann is accused of directing employees to torrent PiLiMi soon after it became available, messaging colleagues that the mirror dropped “just in time!” Responding, an Anthropic staffer wrote back, “zlibrary my beloved.”

Music publishers pointed to these comments as proof that Anthropic extolled the use of piracy and relied on torrenting to quickly access new training data. In total, they alleged that crawling through LibGen and PiLiMi’s non-confidential catalogs showed “bibliographic metadata like title, author, and ISBN” that indicated that “Anthropic torrented at least hundreds of books containing sheet music and song lyrics to musical compositions” owned by publishers suing.

Through discovery, publishers claim they will reveal the “full extent” of Anthropic’s torrenting, the complaint said.

Publishers suspect Claude trained on hit songs

Publishers acknowledged that Anthropic denies using any of the books that they torrented from LibGen and PiLiMi to train commercial Claude AI models. However, they claimed that Anthropic’s statements depend on how “training” is defined, and they think that if the court traces Anthropic’s steps back far enough, it may reveal that commercial models were at some point trained on pirated works. As they explained:

“Often, AI development includes a ‘pretraining’ phase where one AI model may train on ‘synthetic data’ created by another AI model or receive other behavioral feedback from another AI model. Anthropic has trained at least one of its commercially released Claude models using synthetic data created by a non-commercial AI model that was trained on text derived from LibGen and/or PiLiMi. Anthropic employed at least one non-commercial model that was trained on text derived from LibGen and/or PiLiMi to provide at least one commercial Claude model with reinforced feedback.”

Additionally, their complaint noted that recently unsealed documents from the book authors’ case “revealed that Anthropic exploits the pirated books it illegally torrented from LibGen in connection with its guardrails.” For example, in one filing, an Anthropic witness testified that Anthropic stopped training large language Models (LLMs) on LibGen but continued using the LibGen dataset to see if long strings of text in outputs too closely matched source text.

A spokesperson for Anthropic provided Ars with a statement that seems to suggest that music publishers are grasping at straws by digging through book authors’ settled complaint.

“This is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts,” Anthropic’s spokesperson said. “Training generative AI models is a transformative fair use—as the court held in Bartz—and we will defend ourselves robustly.”

Songwriters allegedly harmed by AI songs

Anthropic’s statement neglects to mention that the fair use ruling hinged on book authors’ inability to prove market harms or that AI tools had substituted them in their markets.

Only Anthropic knows for sure how often users rely on Claude to generate substitutes for musicians’ songs, the lawsuit said. But publishers seem to think that music rightsholders may have a better chance at proving market harms than authors did.

They’ve alleged that Anthropic publicly tracks the threat to song lyricists from its AI products and that the company knows that AI-generated songs currently topping music charts compete directly with musicians whose songs were used without payment to allegedly train the AI replacing them in top slots. Most glaringly, the US Copyright Office has “observed that ‘where a generative AI model’s outputs, even if not substantially similar to a specific copyrighted work, compete in the market for that type of work,’ including in the case of song lyrics,” the outputs may dilute royalty pools, the lawsuit said.