Anthropic made two notable headlines this week, one showcasing progress in automated AI research and the other involving a major legal challenge over copyright.
The company published a new paper, “Automated Researchers Can Reliably Mitigate Alignment Failures,” describing a system in which AI models improve another model’s alignment performance without human guidance. Led by Anthropic fellow Chen Yueh-Han, the system searches existing literature, proposes training methods, and iteratively refines a model across ten benchmarks tied to misaligned behaviors, improving performance on all of them without degrading overall capability. The paper found that the best automated method outperformed proposals from experienced human researchers within six hours, at a fraction of the cost, roughly $4 per hour in API inference compared to $150 per hour for human researchers. Anthropic acknowledged limitations, noting the approach depends heavily on how well existing benchmarks reflect true alignment goals. The research is seen as a step toward recursive self-improvement, a concept some view as AI’s next major milestone.
Along with this, Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and other music publishers filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, along with co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging the company engaged in a widespread campaign of illegally torrenting and scraping copyrighted material to train its Claude models. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was first reported by Music Business Worldwide. An Anthropic spokesperson said the company disagreed with the claims and intended to defend itself in court.
The case follows earlier litigation involving some of the same legal representation, including a January lawsuit from Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, and the Bartz v. Anthropic case, which resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement after a judge ruled that while training on copyrighted material was legal, acquiring it through piracy was not. The new lawsuit expands on those claims, citing alleged piracy of millions of books, including works containing song lyrics and sheet music.
