AI companies face legal challenges over content use

Sony Music and Warner have sued Anthropic, alleging the AI company illicitly used their music and lyrics to train its models. This follows a similar lawsuit from Universal, which filed in January. Anthropic, which previously settled a book piracy case for $1.5 billion, responded by stating it would defend itself in court. The lawsuits accuse Anthropic of torrenting music catalogs and copying lyrics from third-party websites, with claims that co-founder Benjamin Mann directed these activities. OpenAI’s past handling of training data for Sora has raised concerns about AI companies’ approach to content use. Publishers are now facing a dilemma: blocking AI bots risks losing visibility in search results, while trusting companies may expose content to misuse. Training bots harvest data for models, while retrieval bots use it for real-time queries. Publishers are increasingly blocking training bots without licensing deals, but this can disadvantage them in AI answer engines.