Anthropic Sued by Sony, Warner Over Music Copyright Claims
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a joint lawsuit against the AI company late Friday night in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint accuses Anthropic of running "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history," a description that sets the tone for what promises to be a bruising legal fight. The suit names Anthropic itself, along with CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann, as individual defendants.
According to the filing, Anthropic engaged in a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale" to build and profit from its Claude AI models. The publishers say Anthropic used tens of thousands of their copyrighted songs without permission or payment, pulling material from sources that include pirated song databases as well as licensed lyric sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind. The complaint also claims Anthropic ran what it calls a "destructive scanning" operation on used books and drew from bulk datasets such as Common Crawl, The Pile, and Books3, some of which are widely known to contain pirated material.
The publishers claim Claude can be prompted to reproduce song lyrics almost exactly as written, and they point to specific examples, including "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "All I Want for Christmas Is You," "Eye of the Tiger," "Here Comes Santa Claus," and "Paper Rings." That argument echoes the kind of claims The New York Times has made against OpenAI and Microsoft, where the ability to reproduce copyrighted text verbatim is used as evidence that the underlying use wasn't fair use at all.
Sony and Warner are seeking a jury trial and statutory damages that could reach $150,000 for every infringed work, plus another $25,000 for each instance where they say Anthropic stripped out copyright management information. With tens of thousands of songs allegedly involved, the total exposure could run into the billions.
Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO sued Anthropic back in 2023 over roughly 500 songs, in a case that started in Nashville before moving to California. BMG filed its own suit earlier this year covering 493 compositions. With Sony and Warner now in the mix, the publishing arms of all three major music companies are officially suing Anthropic at once.
Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers last September over claims it trained its models on pirated books, the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history at the time. The new lawsuit points to that very settlement as proof the payout wasn't big enough to change Anthropic's behavior, calling it simply "the cost of doing business."
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