Sony is suing the company that makes my AI.
I still use it every day.

A screenshot came across my feed: thirty-five music publishers suing the company that makes the AI my team uses every working day. The comments split immediately into the usual two camps — and both, I think, were arguing about the wrong thing.

What actually happened

Two facts, both on the public record.

Last year, settled. In Bartz v. Anthropic, the company agreed to pay US$1.5 billion — the largest copyright settlement in American history — over roughly 500,000 pirated works taken from LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror. Authors received about US$3,000 per book. Anthropic agreed to destroy the torrented files. The settlement grants no permission for future use.

Note what that case was not. It was not a subtle argument about whether learning from text is transformative. Those books were torrented from known piracy sites. That is why it settled.

Last week, filed. Thirty-five publishers including Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed in the Northern District of California on 28 August, naming Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally, over at least 20,000 compositions, alleging acquisition by “torrenting, scraping and downloading,” with statutory damages of up to US$150,000 per work. That case is filed, not decided, and I am not going to pretend to know how it ends.

My disclosure, up front: my company runs on these tools. I use Claude every working day. I am not writing this from outside.

Nobody in this argument has clean hands

Here is the part that makes the finger-pointing hard to take seriously, from whichever direction it comes.

For its first century, the United States was the most systematic copyright pirate on earth — by statute. The Copyright Act of 1790 protected American authors and explicitly left foreign works unprotected. American publishers printed Dickens by the hundred thousand and paid him nothing; he toured America raising it and was mocked as greedy for doing so. The United States did not join the Berne Convention until 1988 — a hundred and two years after it was written.

Its industrial base was built the same way. Samuel Slater memorised British textile-mill designs and carried them across the Atlantic in 1789, against British export law. In America he is the Father of the Industrial Revolution. In Britain he was Slater the Traitor.

The sequence repeats without exception. Britain restricted machinery exports; America ignored it. Japan was accused through the 1960s and 70s, then Korea, then Taiwan, now China. The accusation always comes from whoever is currently ahead, and always lands on whoever is currently catching up.

But “they did it too” is not my argument

I want to be precise here, because the lazy version of this piece writes itself and I do not believe it.

Hypocrisy does not make anything acceptable. If a company took work without permission, that is wrong on its own terms, and it stays wrong whatever the United States did in 1830. A Malaysian songwriter whose lyrics were scraped is not made whole by a history lesson.

What hypocrisy destroys is standing — the right to lecture. That is all, and that is enough. If your industrial base was built on copied designs and your publishing industry on unpaid foreign authors, you may still enforce your law. You have simply lost the vocabulary to moralise about it. Enforce quietly. Skip the sermon.

So my position is not that one side is innocent and the other guilty. It is: stop pointing fingers, because everybody in this room has a history.

The law was never the standard anyway

And here is what I actually think, which is a smaller claim than a geopolitical one and much harder to live up to.

Law or no law was never the issue. Integrity is.

The law is a floor. It tells you the minimum below which you will be punished. It arrives late by design, lags technology by years, and is written in response to things that already happened. A company that behaves well only where the law has already arrived does not have integrity. It has compliance — and compliance is just integrity with a supervisor.

Consider what that decision looked like from inside the room. In 2022, nobody knew whether training on copyrighted text was fair use — genuinely unsettled, argued in good faith by serious people on both sides. But “should we torrent half a million books from a piracy site” was never the unsettled part. That question did not require a court. It required somebody in the room to say no.

This is my father’s line about tax, wearing different clothes. Paying tax is a responsibility, and proof of capability — a moral position long before it became the practical one. Integrity works the same way: it is what you do in the gap before the law arrives, and that gap is exactly where character becomes visible.

Which means your turn is now

If this were only about large American labs it would be gossip. It is not, because every business reading this is standing in the same gap.

You are making decisions this month that the law has not caught up with. Can you train on your customers’ data because your terms technically permit it? Can you publish AI-generated content without saying so? Can you scrape a competitor’s catalogue because nothing yet forbids it? Can you clone a voice, a style, a face, because the statute is silent?

Nobody will punish you for most of that today. The law will arrive in a few years and it will look backwards — which is the argument I made about enforcement becoming a search rather than a lottery. But set the punishment aside entirely, because that is the compliance frame again.

And if somebody is selling you the shortcut — the growth hack, the scraping tool, the clever structure — apply the test I apply to every adviser: what do they carry if it goes wrong? Usually nothing. You carry all of it.

The real question is simpler and needs no lawyer: would you be comfortable if the person on the other side could see exactly what you did? If yes, proceed. If no, the absence of a rule is not permission. It is just an absence.

To be fair

Three honest qualifications.

Not every AI training question is a LibGen question. Whether a model learning statistical patterns from lawfully accessed text infringes anything is a real and unresolved question, and reasonable people take opposite sides. I am drawing a line between that and downloading from a piracy site — I think the line is clear, but I would not pretend the whole field sits on one side of it.

Filed is not proven. The music publishers’ case is an allegation. Anthropic will answer it, courts will decide, and I am not convicting anyone from a screenshot on my phone.

And I am implicated, not neutral. I use these tools, I sell services built on them, and my business is better because of work taken from people who were never asked. That is uncomfortable, and I would rather say it myself than have someone else point it out. The honest position for anyone in my industry is not innocence. It is paying attention to what we do next — and being willing to pay for inputs wherever a licensed path exists.

The bottom line

Stop pointing. Everyone in this argument, on both sides of the world, has taken something at some point in their history.

Then ask the only question that actually separates companies: not “is this legal yet” but “would I do this if the rule never came?” That answer is your integrity, and unlike compliance, nobody has to enforce it.

I have watched enough business to have formed a simple view about this, and I would rather state it plainly than dress it up in strategy language.

I always believe in karma.

Not as mysticism. As observation. The bill for how you behaved arrives later than the benefit — which is precisely why so many people believe they have escaped it. Anthropic did not get away with those books. It got billed three years afterwards: one and a half billion dollars, files destroyed, and its founders’ names on a second complaint. The gap between the act and the invoice was never an exemption. It was only a delay long enough to fool anyone who was not paying attention.

So take what you like from the legal arguments. But when the rule has not arrived, and nobody is watching, and the shortcut would cost you nothing today — understand what you are actually doing. That is not a free move. It is a deferred one.