Sony and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over 'Massive' Copyright Infringement

Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging the AI company engaged in "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." The suit, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, claims Anthropic used "tens of thousands" of copyrighted song lyrics to train its Claude models without permission.

The publishers are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work, plus an additional $25,000 for each instance where copyright management information was stripped. With potentially thousands of works at stake, damages could reach several billion dollars if the court rules in the plaintiffs' favor.

The complaint names Anthropic's co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, as individual defendants. It alleges that Mann personally used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. The suit also claims Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which had paid to license content from the labels.

Specific songs allegedly found in Anthropic's training data include Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Bon Jovi's "Livin' On a Prayer," Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings."

This is not Anthropic's first copyright rodeo. The company recently agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with the publishing industry, and faces separate suits from Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.