None of Them Should Be Trusted: AI, Copyright, and the Music Industry’s Repeat Offenders

Photo by Mikhail Nilov.

It started with a headline and a number: $76 million raised by Stability AI, a company selling the promise of making art by prompting. Three days later, two of the same music giants backing that deal filed a lawsuit against another AI firm, Anthropic, in federal court – alleging theft on a scale that could rewrite the rules of both music and money. In this business, the difference between investor, plaintiff, and defendant is measured not in ethics, but in equity – and it's never been clearer that the real currency isn't copyright, whatever the complaints claim, but leverage. What happens next isn't just a courtroom scuffle over royalties. It's a test of whether the old guard's playbook – settle first, sue later, and always follow the money – can keep pace with an industry where the only thing faster than innovation is how quickly major labels claim to be its "biggest victim."

The timing of these events is worth paying attention to, especially the lawsuit filed only three days later by Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell against Anthropic, a company that doesn't seem as preoccupied with the music industry as other AI companies like Udio or Suno, to name a few. With the latter, Warner Music Group settled back in November.

Stability AI's Sean Parker, executive chairman, has an interesting tenure, to say the least, as co-founder of the infamous Napster, which some say was the first big enough disruptor of the existing system and a grand master of illegally torrented music on the internet to get noticed by that same Big Three, and after years of lawsuits it went bankrupt in June 2002.

Back then, in the early 2000s, Parker and his partners had rushed to claim that music would become a commodity, with little to no barriers to entry – a claim that turned out to be true; only the timing of it was before the real battle for streaming music began to surface.

What followed over the next 4 years was a battle over streaming music that not everyone took equally seriously at first. In 2006, Spotify was founded and, in under two years, launched the app that managed to monopolize the system. Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek had a plan. One thing he had to be good at was striking deals – whatever sales pitch he sang to the Big Three, he managed to convince them to get "on his side," offering higher incentives, better pay, and, since licensing is the business these companies are in, a cut of exactly the kind they understood. Needless to say, it paid off for the investors in billions of dollars in revenue but not so much for the culture; we’ll save this talk for another day.

Bringing the major labels into his endeavor clearly paid off in the long run. That's the game: convince a majority of the Big Three – admittedly a very small number – that you'll make them more money, and you can make the biggest deals in music, tech, and Silicon Valley dance to the rhythm of money flowing in.

Fast forward to the AI battles, and he seems to be following the same path his opponent took back when streaming overshadowed every other form of music consumption and became dominant in an industry where that was once unthinkable. And mind you, copyright laws were written before the internet.

Pursuing major labels is clearly paying off big time. The ripple effect of it was as unavoidable as Napster's fall in 2002. Parker took notes, learned his lessons the hard way, and is now back in the game after what Spotify did when it secured its future. Since then, its dominance has been so unthinkable that Billboard called Daniel Ek “the most influential figure in the music industry” in 2017, beating Sir Lucian Grainge, Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, who has been named the most powerful person in the music industry by Billboard eight times.

When a company invests in one AI company, it's natural to assume they'd start treating similar companies – like Udio and Suno – as competitors. What's less evident is why two of these companies would sue Anthropic, an AI company that doesn't claim to focus on AI-generated music or market its product as such.

An interview with Dario Amodei, Anthropic co-founder, on Bloomberg Originals surpassed 2.9 million views. Once you get past the "yo-yoing" remarks, Amodei comes across as reasonable – honest, or at least trying to be. He mentions bi-weekly, sometimes hours-long meetings with the entire team, which he says help him brainstorm and stay open about everything happening at the company.

There is this number that I keep returning to: $965,000,000,000. That is Anthropic's confirmed valuation as of a Series H round closed on May 29th, a few months ago. Eleven weeks later, Forbes reported the company is eyeing $2 trillion at an October IPO. I want to hold that number next to a smaller one before analyzing what this litigation is actually for. Round Hill Music, one of the publishers that owns and administers song catalogs, is suing Anthropic and Suno for roughly a billion dollars apiece, and Round Hill's entire portfolio – over two hundred thousand copyrighted works – is worth $1.1 billion. If the lawsuit fully succeeds, it's worth nearly as much as what the company owns.

If conspiracies didn't have such great storylines, nobody would believe in them. I am telling you the numbers first because if you hear the story first, it's easier to believe than the numbers actually allow. The story, as it's been told since August 28th, when Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic and called it "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history," is a neat one: reckless tech company steals from working musicians, gets caught, faces justice. Every part of that sentence is defensible, quite literally, in court. But a good story doesn't tell the whole story. On September 8th, the case was formally related to two earlier suits from the same publishing families and a third from BMG, and reassigned to Judge Eumi K. Lee in the Northern District of California. These four lawsuits share the same underlying legal theory. That's not spitballing; that's an official docket entry, and I read it twice to make sure I wasn't overreading a routine administrative order into something more dramatic than it was. It isn't more dramatic than it is. It's exactly this dramatic: one company, sued four times, by the same handful of corporate families, in the same courthouse, in under three years – litigation that rapidly progressed in the last three weeks, right after Anthropic's new, near-trillion-dollar valuation.

Three weeks before the reassignment, something happened that changed what kind of writer I get to be about this story. Benjamin Mann, Anthropic's co-founder, filed his own ‘Answer’ to the operative complaint in the earliest of the four cases. Under his own name, through his own attorneys, in a document filed with a federal court, he admitted that he discussed acquiring a pirated-book dataset called LibGen with CEO Dario Amodei, that Amodei approved the acquisition, and that Mann used BitTorrent to obtain it while employed at Anthropic. He is not disputing that this happened. He is disputing the edges of it – which specific 2022 torrenting expansion he personally signed off on, whether a link he posted constituted "sharing" or merely announcing that a dataset existed. The core of the allegation is no longer really an allegation. It's a fact two lawyers stipulated to on his behalf, filed under a different case number, findable by anyone with a PACER account and forty minutes to spare.

I want to sit with that for a second, because in a story like this, it's not usual to get to stop hedging. Publishers' own subsequent filing – their opposition to a separate motion filed by Amodei himself – quotes him characterizing the alternative to piracy, licensing the material properly, as a "legal/practice/business slog." I have read several corporate depositions and denials, and I have never seen a founder's own words do the plaintiffs' rhetorical work for them this cleanly. He did not say the licensing process was impossible. He said it was a slog. He chose the word that means "tedious, difficult, worth avoiding" over the word that means "against the law," and then acted on that choice anyway. That is a decision made by a person, about a shortcut, that he apparently expected never to have to explain in a courtroom.

This all points to something quite obvious: he is telling the truth. Whether Amodei can uphold his own standards is a different discussion, but he is currently the only one trying to give fair warnings about AI and the need to regulate it.

Here is where the story starts to strain: Claude was never built to be a music product. It doesn't function the way Suno and Udio do: turning a text prompt into a finished, streamable track. And yet Suno – the platform that does exactly that – settled with Warner Music Group months ago and is, as of this writing, facing not one new lawsuit but two, filed on consecutive days in two different countries, over two entirely different legal theories, neither of which Anthropic is currently defending against with anything like the same evidentiary weight arrayed against it.

Focus, I want you to really focus here.

On September 1st, in federal court in Massachusetts, Jason Isbell, David Lowery, and two other musicians filed a class action against Suno alleging violation of seventeen states' and territories' right-of-publicity laws – not copyright, identity. The complaint says Suno lets users type an artist's name into a prompt and get music back that mimics that artist's voice and style, and that when Suno's own filters catch the attempt, users route around it by spacing out the letters – a workaround the filing calls "a designed, systemic commercial feature," language chosen, I think, because it forecloses the "unintended consequence" defense before Suno can raise it. "A musician's identity is their property," the filing says. "Suno took it without consent."

The next morning, Canada's SOCAN – the collecting society that licenses public performance rights for nearly the entire practical catalog of music played in that country, representing rights-holders across roughly 195 territories through reciprocal agreements – filed in Federal Court in Ottawa and did something none of the four publisher suits against Anthropic have yet managed. At this point, I don't think they will, because it simply doesn't exist. SOCAN attached proof – not an allegation that Claude "generates output infringing Publishers' works" – language I have now read so many times across so many complaints that it has started to lose its shape – but actual side-by-side musical transcriptions, melody, harmony, and lyrics aligned measure by measure, showing Suno-generated recordings that are, in the filing's own words, "virtually identical" to Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" and Tom Cochrane's "Life Is a Highway." SOCAN's complaint names 150 such examples and calls that number "only the tip of the iceberg." Anthropic's lawyers are telling Judge Lee, in a motion currently pending, that in over two years and two amended complaints, Publishers have never produced a single comparable example against Claude. I don't know yet whether that's because the underlying conduct is genuinely different in scale, or because nobody suing Anthropic has bothered to go looking the way SOCAN just did. I think that distinction matters enormously, and I think almost nobody covering this story has asked it out loud.

Publishers' answer to Anthropic's motion is quite remarkable – it complicates my own uncertainty in the opposite direction. They didn't just argue that the legal standard doesn't require examples at the pleading stage, though they did. They went back into the record of the earliest case and pulled Anthropic's own prior representations to that court – "Typical Anthropic users do not request song lyrics from Claude"... "Claude customers are not using Claude to generate song lyrics" – and showed that discovery in that case later proved both statements false. The word "lyric" appeared in more than 170,000 Claude prompt-and-output records in a single nine-day window in September 2023, including one from Anthropic's own co-founder and Chief Compute Officer, Tom Brown, who asked Claude for the lyrics to Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row." Anthropic admitted to those outputs in that earlier case. So: a company that told a federal court its users don't ask for song lyrics, while its own co-founder was asking Claude for song lyrics, is now telling a different federal court that nobody's shown a comparable example happening again. I am not telling you which of these facts should carry more weight in a legal proceeding – that's for Judge Lee, not for me. I am telling you that a reporter who only read Anthropic's motion and stopped there would have written a different, less accurate story than the one you are reading now.

Follow the money one level further and the moral clarity of "AI company gets sued, industry protects its own" shatters as Chinese porcelain dropped from the top floor of Salesforce Tower. On August 25th – three days before Sony and Warner Chappell filed their suit against Anthropic – Stability AI closed a $76 million Series B. The backers: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, Electronic Arts, AMD Ventures, and Pacific Alliance Ventures. All three majors whose publishing arms are suing, licensing, or both, in the Anthropic and Suno cases, are simultaneously equity partners in a company that trains generative models on scraped and licensed data using methods not meaningfully distinguishable, in kind, from what's alleged against the companies they're currently suing. Stability's total funding since its founding is $232 million – a company worth, by any reasonable multiple, a rounding error next to Anthropic's $965 billion – and the majors chose to invest in it rather than sue it, three days before choosing to sue someone else for what looks, on paper, like a comparable set of underlying choices. I want to be extremely precise about what I'm not saying: I am not saying Stability's conduct and Anthropic's admitted conduct are identical, or that Stability is innocent – it's still defending a pending U.S. copyright suit from Getty Images after mostly prevailing in a parallel UK case, which is its own unresolved story. I am saying that "we sue companies that steal from artists" and "we invest in a company built the same way three days before suing a different one" cannot both be a coherent moral position.

If you want to know how seriously to take the "we're protecting our artists" framing that runs through every one of these complaints, don't look at the complaints. Look at a different courtroom, where the same companies are the defendants instead of the plaintiffs. The American Federation of Musicians sued Universal and Warner in June over a "new use" clause in the union's labor agreement – a provision meant to guarantee session musicians get paid when a recording resurfaces somewhere nobody anticipated. Warner's actual filed position in that case is that the clause doesn't apply: since no AFM standard agreement covers this new use, the clause "has nothing to point to" – meaning, in the company's own words, "there is no entitlement to payment." I have now read that sentence enough times that I can recite it in my dreams, and I want you to sit with the shape of it the way I did. The publishing arm of a company is, in one court, calling an AI company's use of session musicians' recorded labor "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." The same company, in a different court, is arguing that its own session musicians are owed nothing for a functionally similar reuse of their labor, because no contract anticipated the specific format. Theft, apparently, is a word that activates only when someone outside the circle takes something – even when that something belongs in shared custody between the musicians and the publishers, not the inner-circle CEOs, or at least not entirely.

It’s clear: this has never been about the working songwriter; honestly, that sentence should actually anger you more than any single complaint. Three companies have controlled most of the money that flows through recorded music for decades. That consolidation – not artificial intelligence, not large language models, not anything invented in the last five years – is the most real, unresolved reason a musician can spend thirty years unable to get a verifiable accounting for her royalties. The technology at the center of every one of these lawsuits is the best tool anyone has ever built for solving that specific, boring, decades-old accounting failure – matching a recording to its rights-holders at scale is the pattern-matching nearly all current AI models excel at. Instead of using it to help allocate unclaimed royalties, the same three majors are simply signing equity and licensing arrangements with whichever AI platforms strike the best deal, while suing whichever ones didn't, and calling the entire operation a defense of the songwriter. The songwriter, notably, is not a party to any of these settlements. She is the reason they exist.

Napster lost that first war for a reason so unglamorous that everyone skips it on the way to the nostalgia: it never worked out how to pay anyone, majors included, and declining to pay the people who hold the copyrights is, historically, less a business strategy than a save-the-date for your own bankruptcy hearing. Ek took one look at that and did the one thing Silicon Valley is actually excellent at: learning the wrong lesson correctly. Instead of not paying the majors, he paid them spectacularly, in equity, in guaranteed minimums, in terms so comfortable that all three would rather own a piece of the house than burn it down, which is how you end up with a "revolutionary" platform whose actual innovation was cutting in the same three people who'd always been cut in, while everyone smaller than a major discovered they'd been quietly reclassified as the tip. The math isn't mysterious, whatever the keynote decks imply: streaming's pool of money is fixed, so every guaranteed dollar and every equity point that goes to a major on the way in is a dollar that never makes it to the per-stream rate the rest of the industry survives on, which is the actual, spreadsheet-legible reason that rate has spent two decades sinking toward a fraction of a cent while the architects of the deal kept getting richer regardless. Call it a big-ball game if you want to be polite about it; the honest subtitle was always "the three of you eat first, everyone else can fight over the napkin," and it's worth noticing that Stability AI, Anthropic, and every AI company currently sliding a licensing term sheet across the table to the Big Three is running the identical play, just with better lawyers and a shorter memory. Get angry about 2008 if you like. I'd save some for right now - apparently nobody in the room since has felt the need to rewrite a single line of it.

"The current battle dates at least to 1906," as Kelefa Sanneh puts it in "Who's Afraid of A.I. Music?" – and that's true. But when he went on to describe the A.I.-backlash concerns, he wrote that "people worry that this complicated system of attribution will be overwhelmed by a tide of interchangeable, computer-generated songs that weren't really made by or for anybody," before adding, "I think that's unlikely." I disagree – and so does the Deezer study, which shows that only 3% of listeners can distinguish between AI-made and human-made songs. As a music magazine editor flooded with AI-generated music every day, I can attest that this nightmare has become just another Wednesday; most listeners can't tell the difference.

Sanneh isn't the only one making that case, and the more rigorous version of it is worth pointing out before moving forward. Michael Spitzer, the University of Liverpool musicologist who has spent his career tracing music back to its first appearance in human life, makes essentially the same claim on more scientific footing: "Every artist wants to be distinctive. There is a competitive drive, which forces people to always turn their back on fashion and create something new. It's always been the way. A second reason is that, with the proliferation of genres, there are thousands and thousands of genres and some genres." Physical objects – instruments in music, brushes and canvases in painting – have always been extraordinary tools for expressing human identity, and as long as people have identities, and are different from one another, they will make music to reflect that. Spitzer goes further than Sanneh, arguing that resisting homogenization is both natural and, in some sense, structural: "One of the surprises is that music is fractal in its nature. It's as fractal as a universe, which is to say that a galaxy has the same shape as a brain cell." It's a genuinely beautiful argument to make from someone who's earned the right to make it. The accuracy of the claim doesn't hold up as well: per Deezer, we're moving in the opposite direction – not because human identity doesn't matter anymore, but because 97% of listeners can't tell whether what they're hearing was made by a machine.

Today, at Jay-Z's Roc Nation School of Music, that statement travels far beyond what you'd imagine. Students like myself sat in a classroom where a professor explained that, as an independent artist, you need to think of yourselves as "the CEOs of the company," and shamelessly pressured us to bend under the equity overlords acquiring music rights with a mid-term exam designed entirely around the business problems of one of these publishers, who sat in the room taking ideas they never intended to compensate us for. An entire class designed to test students' ability to work for a company whose single goal is maximizing profits from a catalog dating back to the '50s and '70s. I could not help but wonder: would any of the actual singers or songwriters want this to happen to their music? I might be wrong, but I highly doubt it. When a professor students are supposed to look up to convinces a room full of young minds that a music catalog should serve as collateral for a bank loan, I have no other way to put it than to call it evil. His name is Clayton Durant. I recommend you stay as far as you can from any "music schools" that teach you accounting above creativity, if music still means something other than green dollar signs.

It's a shame you can't yet sue college professors over moral incompetence.

The rise in AI copyright lawsuits suggests an urgent need to reevaluate the mechanisms already in place – mechanisms that, "gradually, then all of a sudden," to borrow the line Hemingway used in The Sun Also Rises to describe how a man goes bankrupt, piled up and grew more tangled since their first implementation in the U.S., and the resemblance fits uncomfortably well a century later. In fact, we're currently living in a world where the overwhelming majority of independent artists have no idea how to register or claim their royalties. They aren't equipped to navigate the process at all.

What artists – and, respectfully, a lot of their managers – need is more resources, education, and registration made accessible to everyone. Which brings us to the next issue: the need to distinguish between AI-made music and human-made music, and to differentiate the pay for each, because there's no other way to keep human-made music from becoming homogeneous. In that scenario, everyone, including the Big Three, is losing.

So here's what I think: Anthropic did the thing. Its co-founder said so, in writing, under his own name, to a federal court, and I don't get to soften that into an "alleged" because the word no longer fits. But "did the thing" describes a meaningful share of an entire industry right now, at tremendously different scales, facing different consequences, based on a variable that has nothing to do with culpability: who settled first, who has the most exposed valuation, who filed the sloppiest complaint, who drew a plaintiff willing to do the forensic work of a musical transcription instead of writing a paragraph of adjectives. Round Hill's CEO says he won't settle, that he wants a jury, that he wants accountability rather than a number. I believe he believes that. Still, if Anthropic's valuation is what Forbes projects, "accountability" and "the largest available number" will blur in any settlement conference. In the end, no matter which catalog, transcription, or claim is put forward, it’s unlikely to change who walks away with a bag full of cash that was meant, at least in part, for those who wrote the lyrics and composed the melodies–long before any of these companies existed. Warner Music Group won't say which songs went into training Suno's models, or whether songwriters had a clear choice to opt out. Suno's chief was explicit: "We weren't involved in deciding what music they handed over to us." The same label suing Anthropic for training on work without consent handed over an unknown number of songs to a different AI company without, apparently, asking the people who made them. That's the ledger I can't seem to balance. I'm not sure anyone currently suing anyone else is actually trying to.

Let's be as plain as the nose on your face about who's actually named in this piece, and why none of them have earned the benefit of the doubt. Sean Parker built his fortune on the platform that broke the old system, and now sits atop the company repeating the same logic for the next disruption. Daniel Ek convinced three of the most protective companies in the world to hand him their catalogs, then spent the next fifteen years proving that "partnership" meant they'd get paid and the people who wrote the songs wouldn't. Lucian Grainge has been the single most powerful person in music for over a decade running, through streaming, through AI, through every transition – which either means he's the smartest person in the room, or the room has been rigged the same way since before he walked in. I'd bet on both being true at once. Dario Amodei, by his own company's court filings, is the only one who admitted, under his own name, to doing what everyone else is merely accused of – yet he may be the closest thing to an honest actor in the story, which says a lot about the baseline. Suno settled the fight it could afford to lose and is still facing two more, on two continents, brought by people who actually did the work of proving it. None of these companies, or the men running them, should be trusted going forward. That's not a prediction; it's a historical pattern: Napster to Spotify to streaming's broken royalty math to a $76 million round that turned three lawsuit plaintiffs into equity partners inside of three business days. Technology changes every decade. The way these companies act and things they prioritize remains the same.

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