Anthropic's New Plugins and $3 Billion Lawsuit

0:00Today on the podcast, we have a ton of news from Anthropik. I think the first one is that they've just introduced a whole bunch of new plugins that can go with their new co-working capability that they've recently ruled out. And the other bit of news is less good for Anthropic. There's a whole bunch of different music publishers. They're suing Anthropic for$3 billion for what they call flagrant piracy of about 20 ,000 pieces of work. So today on the podcast, we're going to break down the new features for Anthropic and some of the controversy that they have found themselves in this week. Before we get into that, I wanted to mention if you want access to building AI tools, if you're not a developer, I'd love for you to check out my platform, AIbox.ai.

0:39You can describe any tool you want to create, any workflow you want to automate. It will link together different AI models, put in prompts for you, and create a tool that can automate what you do. If you want to go try it out, there's a link in the description to AIbox.ai. I'd love to hear what you think about it. Let's get into the episode. So earlier this month, Anthropik, they released their new co-work. Basically, this is a new agent kind of tool that gives a lot of the core capabilities of their Cloud Code assistant that I think, you know, a lot of developers are very famously in love with.

1:10Over here at AIbox, my startup, we use Cloud Code a ton. Not myself. I'm not a developer, but our developers, this is basically what we run everything on. So they've released essentially something like Cloud Code, but for the general population, the general public that is not developers. So they've built this sort of more general purpose product and they're calling this Cowork. So right now they have just expanded Cowork with a bunch of new features that are aimed at, I think, a lot of enterprise users specifically. And that was kind of where they were initially going with that. But now they've also added plugins.

1:44So plugins are basically designed to automate specialized tasks for a bunch of different departments inside of your company. So that could mean writing marking copy, reviewing legal documents for risk. If you're generating customer support responses, every single plugin applies agentic automation to a specific workflow, which basically lets your team streamline any sort of repeatable work that you do and do it really consistently, which is really cool. So according to Anthropic plugins, let organizations define how work should be done, which tools and data sources Cloud should use, and then also how critical workflows are handled.

2:20Matt Piccoletta, who is a member of Anthropik's product team, was talking about all of this and said that plugins are basically intentionally built to be customizable. So what they say they expect is that enterprise customers are going to develop their own use cases using all of these plugins as part of this kind of big launch that they just did. Anthropik also open sourced 11 internal plugins, while also saying that custom plugins are really easy to build, edit, and share, even if you don't have any expertise, you're not a developer. plugins have basically existed inside of cloud code for a long time but now they're bringing them to co-work which i think is you know fantastic a lot of the great a lot of the best features that are in cloud code if you just give that to the general pub you know general population that is not developers i think this is going to be really popular so they're bringing them all into co-work and i think this is basically about making the functionality increase for clod and for for more people this is what they said about it they said quote what we're really doing with this launch is bringing them to co-work and giving them a more user-friendly ui-centric experience so the maximum number of people can use them inside of anthropic themselves plugins have already had a lot of good traction apparently they say inside of their departments uh like data analysts and sales they're using these a lot uh and then picoletta also kind of said that the sales is was a particularly strong example like they see a lot of benefit from this he said that the plugins helped not only direct sales teams, but also sales adjacent employees stay better connected to customers and customer feedback.

3:48And I've seen a lot of stuff. I've heard a lot of essentially that same sentiment from people using similar tools. So this isn't surprising to me. Something that I think makes this particularly powerful is the more that a company is going to use these plugins, the more Claude can learn about the company's workflows and then how to actually optimize it. So it's learning as you're doing this and helping you optimize your company. Right now, the plugins are saved locally on your computer. But the company said that any any company in the future can have kind of organization wide sharing tools, and that's going to be coming soon.

4:21So that'll be something that they roll out. Coworkrate now launched about two weeks ago. And I think it's still in kind of this research preview. Anthropic hasn't really said when it's going to be more broadly available. But plugins are currently accessible to all paying Claude customers, which I think is fantastic. So those are the cool features and the cool stuff that Claude has been and Anthropic has been rolling out separately on another note. I want to talk a little bit about some of the legal challenges that Anthropic has been facing this week. So there is a group of music publishers. This is all led by Concord Music Group and also Universal Music Group.

4:53Like Universal Music Group seems to be the one filing most of these lawsuits. They've done it against basically all of the major AI companies. And in this particular lawsuit, they are essentially alleging that Anthropic illegally downloaded more than 20 ,000 copyrighted works, including sheet music, lyrics, and musical compositions. Now, what's interesting to me is, you know, Anthropic isn't a company that has a music generation model. It's not like Udeo or Suno. And what's interesting is that Universal Music Group, you know, I think they're not going to go after them for, look, you downloaded all of the music in the whole world, because I mean, I'm assuming they haven't if this isn't what they're going after them for.

5:29But what they can go after them for, since it seems like they just want to launch lawsuits against anyone, one is downloading, you know, like sheet music or lyrics. And it's like, well, it's copyrighted. The lyrics are copyrighted. And I'm sure this just got sucked up and anthropic kind of scraping the whole internet for blogs or whatever, like Google and open AI and everyone else did. So it's interesting to me. It's an interesting angle on a lawsuit is, you know, 20 ,000. Well, I mean, there's like millions of songs in the world, but let's say they grabbed the lyrics for 20 ,000 quote, copyrighted works, um, musical compositions.

5:59I think that's very interesting. so Universal Music Group claims the potential damages could exceed three billion dollars making this one of the largest non-class action lawsuit cases in U.S. history so to me I don't to me this is honestly kind of ludicrous 20 ,000 lyrics for 20 ,000 songs let's say for three billion dollars in damages so the lawsuit was filed by the same legal team which is behind the Barts versus Anthropic. This is basically a case where the authors are accusing them of training their models on copyrighted books. In that case, Judge William Alsop ruled that training AI models on copyrighted materials can be legal, but that requiring the content through piracy is not.

6:41Basically what Anthropic did is they actually, and like I think Anthropic was definitely in the wrong in that case, they went and to like a pirated website and downloaded like all the books in the world and just kind of like downloaded them off of a pirated website. So that is bad. After Anthropic did that, they then went and purchased like every book they could. And they had like basically factories with robots that were like flipping through the pages of all these books. They ripped the covers off, flip through all the pages, take pictures of all the pages, upload them into their data set. And like that was what they were using to train the models.

7:12And the judge said that is okay. But because they, you know, pirated them first, he made them pay a fine. And the fine on that was$1.5 billion, which is pretty massive. And then I think the authors received about$3 ,000 per book, there's about 500 ,000 copyrighted titles. So I think that was pretty big. But you know, that wasn't financially crippling to the company, they have 183 billion dollar valuation, they've raised a lot of money. So I think Anthropik was like, and I honestly, I think they, they did wrong, but also those getting those 500 ,000 copyrighted titles and using it to train their model made their model the best model for like a lot of literary stuff so like honestly i think as far as the cost of business it was worth it for anthropic i'm not saying it was morally right i'm just saying i think it was worth it because it gave them a competitive edge over open ai for quite a for quite a while as far as like tone and style of writing um so they probably viewed that as worth it uh they paid the fine which i mean 1.5 billion dollars is still a pretty massive penalty they paid the fine but what's interesting is the same people involved in that lawsuit was like sweet we won this lawsuit now we're gonna go for music and what's interesting is we're going from, you know, getting$1.5 billion for 500 ,000 books to$3 billion for the lyrics of 20 ,000 songs.

8:26To me, it just seems, to me, I don't think this one's going to do as well. So I think originally the music publishers sued Anthropic over about 500 copyrighted works, but then during discovery in the case, they saw that they found more evidence that Anthropic had downloaded thousands more. And so after the court denied their attempt to amend the original lawsuit, which basically they said there was failure to investigate this earlier, right? They're kind of like, look, the scope's getting bigger and bigger. And so that kind of got shut down. After that, then the publishers filed a separate lawsuit.

8:57And that case also said the Anthropics CEO, Dario Amadeo, who's the co-founder, and also Benjamin Mann were like the defendants. So they're going straight after the CEO on this. These lawsuits always have like really intense claims inside of them. So this is an interesting line from this particular lawsuit. It said, while Anthropic is misleading claims to be an AI safety and research company, its record of illegal torrenting of copyrighted works makes clear that its multi-billion dollar business empire has in fact been built on piracy. and I think like yeah it has definitely been helped by that in a lot of ways I think they paid their fines for that this this lawsuit in particular it's crazy to me because originally it was 500 pieces of work and then they they found like more they're like okay whole new lawsuit 20 ,000 if they want three billion dollars I would be I'd be blown away if they got the three billion dollars if they pirated like 20 ,000 things sure pay up the same way they had to pay up for their other lawsuit.

9:59But that's going to be, you know, less than 10 % of that lawsuit. It's going to be a fraction. And so I think the lawyers here might be getting a little bit too, a little bit too excited about the payday and smashing the piggy bank. We'll see what happens. I mean, at the end of the day, I think these AI companies should know that they need to pay for their data, train it responsibly, like all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, I think when there's money to be made, the AI gold rush isn't just for these AI models making money or people using them to make money. It's also from the lawyers that get to sue everybody around all of how everything was built.

10:33So it'll be interesting to see what happens. In the meantime, if you want to try out all of the models from OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or any other of the top AI companies, make sure to go check out AIbox.ai for 20 bucks a month. You get access to all of the top AI models in the world, and you can try them and talk to them all in the same chat thread. Image, audio, text. It's amazing. I hope it saves you money and it is super useful. All right, I'll catch you in the next episode.