Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a federal lawsuit against Anthropic that claimed the AI giant’s alleged theft of the companies’ intellectual property marked “a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale,” representing the latest legal salvo in the music industry‘s reckoning with the technology’s rise.
The named defendants include Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The lawsuit, filed late Friday in the U.S. Northern District of California, alleged that Anthropic used thousands of the companies’ protected work — including songs such as Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough“ and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” among others cited in the 48-page suit — to train its Claude chatbot “in blatant violation of copyright law.” The suit asked the court to force Anthropic to stop the illegal training and pay statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringing work, among other requests.
“These acts separately and together inflict immense harm on Music Publishers and the songwriters they proudly represent,” the attorneys wrote on behalf of the publishing arms. “Defendants can no longer hide their extraordinary theft, and their mass infringement is now well-documented.”
