Don’t trust AI companies with your content. Verify them instead

If it’s a day ending in Y, you can count on a story that further erodes the public’s trust in Big Tech. This week it was Sony Music and Warner suing Anthropic over copyright, accusing the AI company of illicitly pirating music and song lyrics from its catalog to train its AI models. With the lawsuit, Anthropic is now officially the target of all three major music publishers, since Universal brought a similar action in January. As copyright lawsuits go, the allegations are pretty juicy. They paint a picture of Anthropic brazenly pirating music catalogs through torrenting and copying huge troves of lyrics from third-party websites wholesale. The filing claims Anthropic co-founder Benjamin Mann personally conducted or directed the torrenting and discussed it openly in Slack channels. Anthropic, which agreed a year ago to pay $1.5 billion in a settlement over pirated books, responded curtly, telling Axios “we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.” To any media executive, content creator, or news publisher, the lawsuit is more evidence that tech companies can’t be trusted with content. And that conclusion is correct. Ever since OpenAI then-CTO Mira Murati was caught like a deer…