Sony, Warner Sue Anthropic for Billions Over AI Training on Songs

Major music publishers target AI startup over copyright violations

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging the AI startup scraped tens of thousands of copyrighted songs to train its Claude chatbot without authorization or payment.

The lawsuit, filed August 28 in California court, names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants. It accuses them of "torrenting, scraping and downloading" lyrics from copyrighted works and reproducing those lyrics in Claude's responses to user prompts.

The complaint references songs including Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You," Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," and Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger." The publishers describe the alleged infringement as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."

Evidence drawn from prior settlement

According to the filing, Mann and Anthropic downloaded at least 7 million copies of books from pirate websites, including lyrics and sheet music to compositions like Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" and Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." These figures come from a recent copyright case brought by U.S. authors that Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion.

The publishers also allege Anthropic scraped lyrics from legal sites including Musixmatch and LyricFind, as well as datasets from archive sites like Common Crawl. The complaint further claims Anthropic stripped identifying information from songs during text processing, denying copyright owners "valuable attribution" to their work.

Damages could reach billions

The music publishers are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work and $25,000 for each removal or alteration of identifying data. With the suit referencing "tens of thousands" of copyrighted compositions—implying at least 20,000 works—potential damages could run into billions of dollars.

Other songs allegedly infringed include Mark Ronson's "Uptown Funk" and Katy Perry's "California Gurls," according to Music Business Worldwide, which first reported the lawsuit.

Why it matters

This case represents the music industry's most aggressive legal challenge yet to AI companies training models on copyrighted content. With Anthropic preparing for a stock market listing that could value the company at $2 trillion, the lawsuit tests whether AI developers can claim fair use for ingesting creative works at scale—or whether they must negotiate licenses like traditional technology platforms. The outcome could establish precedent for how AI companies access training data across all creative industries.

Pattern of copyright disputes

Anthropic faces multiple copyright challenges beyond this case. Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group have also filed claims against the company. Separately, AI music generator Suno lost a copyright infringement case this month against German licensing agency GEMA over alleged illegal use of songs including Boney M's "Daddy Cool."

Ed Newton-Rex, a U.K.-based composer and copyright campaigner, said he was "not surprised" that rights holders are defending themselves against a company with a "history of downloading and training their AI models on huge libraries."

An Anthropic spokesperson said the company disagrees with the publishers' claims and intends to "defend ourselves robustly in court."

Details of the lawsuit were first reported by Music Business Worldwide.