It’s not just musicians who are raging against (or at least worrying about) the AI machine. A group of publishers including Universal Music Publishing Group are suing AI firm Anthropic for a second time – and seeking more than $3bn of damages. The focus of this new lawsuit is on HOW Anthropic sourced sheet music to train its AI models, with the publishers accusing it of downloading books from ‘shadow’ (pirate) libraries that included scores for hundreds of thousands of songs. To some, that suggests that sourcing material from shadow libraries is an Achilles heel for AI companies’ pushback against lawsuits from rightsholders. The music publishers are now putting that theory to the test.