Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging the AI company stole copyrighted song compositions on a massive scale to train its Claude chatbot. The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants alongside the company itself.
The publishers claim Anthropic illegally torrented, scraped, and downloaded copyrighted lyrics and sheet music from piracy sites like Library Genesis. They’re seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work and $25,000 per DMCA violation, a tab that could climb into the billions given the alleged scope of the infringement.
What the publishers are alleging
According to the complaint, Anthropic’s data acquisition practices weren’t some accidental gray-area misstep. The publishers paint a picture of deliberate, large-scale piracy: tens of thousands of songs allegedly hoovered up from known piracy repositories and fed into Claude’s training pipeline.
The result, they argue, is an AI system that can reproduce copyrighted lyrics verbatim. Songs cited in the lawsuit include iconic works like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Hallelujah.”
