Brands
Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic over alleged use of copyrighted songs in AI training
Music publishers accuse Anthropic of using thousands of copyrighted works to train Claude and seek potentially billions in damages
MUMBAI: Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music and other music publishers have sued Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging the AI company illegally downloaded, scraped and used thousands of copyrighted musical works to train and operate its Claude AI models.
The lawsuit, filed on August 28 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Anthropic obtained copyrighted material through torrent networks, scraping and other unauthorised sources. The publishers are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per alleged willful infringement, potentially taking the case into the multibillion-dollar range.
The complaint alleges that the affected catalogue includes tens of thousands of compositions, including songs such as Eye of the Tiger, September, Uptown Funk, Hallelujah and Taylor Swift’s Paper Rings.
The publishers further allege that Anthropic copied copyrighted works multiple times, including for AI training and in outputs generated by Claude. They claim the model can reproduce copyrighted lyrics and that safeguards introduced after earlier litigation can be bypassed through repeated prompting.
The lawsuit also cites allegations from earlier copyright litigation that Anthropic executives and employees obtained millions of books through pirated sources, including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The publishers allege that Anthropic also scraped lyrics from websites including Musixmatch and LyricFind and used datasets such as Common Crawl, The Pile and Books3.
The case comes after Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with authors in a separate copyright dispute over the use of pirated books for AI training. The publishers are using findings from that litigation to support their allegations in the latest case.
Anthropic has rejected the claims. An Anthropic spokesperson said the company disagrees with the publishers’ allegations and intends to defend itself in court.
The latest lawsuit adds Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell to a growing group of music rights holders pursuing legal action against Anthropic, as the industry intensifies its challenge to the use of copyrighted creative works in AI development.
