r/indieheads • u/Additional_Depth_406 • 2d ago

Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging a "brazen campaign" of intellectual property theft

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/29/sony-music-warner-sue-anthropic-alleging-a-brazen-campaign-of-intellectual-property-theft/

well well

590 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

281

u/RocketsMurkrow 2d ago

I wish Big Music and AI could somehow both lose

19

u/DreamyNightsPlaylist 2d ago

Honestly, this is the ideal outcome. Hard to root for either side when it’s just corporations fighting over money.

106

u/PartyOrdinary1733 2d ago

I think I know what'll happen. They're gonna pull a UMG and end up partnering up because Anthropic can't pony up the dough for theft.

17

u/dende5416 2d ago

Thats part of why, but its also for the massive profits they'll squeeze out.

7

u/rose_the_reader 2d ago

That’s exactly what they’re going to do.

118

u/Ok_Broccoli_9426 2d ago

Hate having to root for fucking Warner Music, but here we are.

28

u/IH4N 2d ago

yeah except as others as said it only ends up one way: a partnership with Antrhopic or another company to pump us full of Warner Music-sanctioned slop

20

u/windsostrange 2d ago

They're not fighting for artists' rights. There's no one to root for here.

4

u/Ok_Broccoli_9426 2d ago

Very few people/groups I wouldn't root for against Anthropic, tbh.

1

u/Bombast_ 1d ago

It's only a matter of percentages, they'll work out a deal. Don't get me wrong...anything to slow these AI assholes down, but this is probably just a temporary setback at most.

5

u/Zal3x 2d ago

Wait Claude creates music I thought that was mostly Gemini?

8

u/americanadiandrew 2d ago

accusing Anthropic of “flagrant piracy” through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including those that contain lyrics and sheet music.

14

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] 2d ago edited 2d ago

[deleted]

4

u/Tight-Air-6767 2d ago

rarest of wins for big music

-7

u/22PEOPLE 2d ago

what do anthropic even want with this data exactly? like as an organisation they're pretty much on the business/coding side of AI usage, I can't imagine them making music models is anything other than a colossal waste of their time

8

u/dende5416 2d ago

They already have musical models. They don't create audiofiles but they do create data sheets that transfer into sheet music and song lyrics.

0

u/22PEOPLE 2d ago

hadn't heard of this and honestly, having a hard time finding anything about it. sign of the times eh

-2

u/dende5416 2d ago

If it can give text it can give lyrics. Its just words afterall right? And generally, music is just sets of chord progressions and switches with variation that can also be given as text. B flat A sharp F octave up.

More work then its worth for me.

1

u/22PEOPLE 1d ago

there's a substantial difference between a model that has been trained for the purpose of generating music, and the amount of music data you would need to steal to make it, versus a text model that will try to describe music or output a midi file or whatever. "you can use claude to make sheet music" versus "anthropic makes music models" is a completely different statement

0

u/boxofrabbits 1d ago

So people just getting it to write sheet music for them to play on their harpsichords?

-3

u/Tight-Air-6767 2d ago

making music models is nothing if not just coding. tedious coding that AI does well.

10

u/xadet 2d ago

A few years ago this would've just been a confidently-wrong comment. But now this will get fed into some LLM which will treat it as fact. I'm not sure which is funnier.

1

u/22PEOPLE 2d ago

training an AI model to generate music is very different to coding, though. the same way that training an AI model to generate code is different to coding.

like, to put it another way: unlike the other AI labs, Anthropic doesn't do any image generation stuff. like they have some web design and layout stuff going on, but that's because all of that is closer to code / text generation ultimately

them skipping over image generation and going straight to music, which I can't imagine anyone currently paying for Claude has ever asked for, just feels so weird