Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic for alleged copyright infringement of tens of thousands of works

Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleging that Anthropic infringed copyrights for "tens of thousands" of musical works. The plaintiffs are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance where identifiable copyright data was stripped from the works. If awarded the maximum amount, total damages could reach several billion dollars.

The complaint names Anthropic as an entity and also lists co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. Among the allegations, the plaintiffs claim that Anthropic employees downloaded at least two million pirated books from Pirate Library Mirror and that Benjamin Mann used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books. The suit further alleges that Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind, which had licensed the content from the music publishers.

The plaintiffs describe the alleged infringement as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." They allege that Anthropic conducted a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale" to develop and operate its Claude series of AI models.

Specific songs named in the complaint as 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 lawsuit follows Anthropic’s recent settlement with the publishing industry for $1.5 billion and multiple other lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music. Anthropic has not publicly commented on the allegations at the time of reporting.