Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell are seeking billions of dollars from Anthropic, accusing the Claude maker of illegally copying tens of thousands of copyrighted songs to train its AI models.
Anthropic is being sued by two major music publishers over allegations that it illegally copied tens of thousands of copyrighted songs to train its artificial intelligence models.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell are seeking potentially billions of dollars in damages, accusing the company of carrying out “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history”.
The lawsuit, filed in a California court on August 28, names Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann alongside the company.
The publishers allege that Anthropic “torrent[ed], scrap[ed] and download[ed]” copyrighted lyrics to train its Claude family of AI models, before reproducing the material in responses to users.
The works allegedly affected include Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger, Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk and Katy Perry’s California Gurls.
The publishers claim Anthropic downloaded at least seven million copies of books from pirate websites, including works containing song lyrics and sheet music.
That figure comes from a separate copyright lawsuit brought against Anthropic by authors, which the company settled for $1.5 billion.
The new case also alleges that Anthropic scraped lyrics from legitimate websites including Musixmatch and LyricFind, as well as datasets held by Common Crawl.
The publishers further claim that Anthropic removed identifying information from songs while processing the material, depriving copyright holders of attribution.
They are seeking up to $150,000 for each allegedly infringed work, plus $25,000 for each instance of identifying information being removed or altered.
The claim suggests at least 20,000 musical compositions could be involved.
Ed Newton-Rex, a composer and campaigner for artists’ rights, said he was “not surprised” that music companies were taking legal action.
Anthropic has also faced copyright claims from Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group.
The case comes amid a growing legal battle over how AI companies obtain training data.
AI developers argue that training models on copyrighted material can be lawful in certain circumstances, while rights holders say companies should obtain licences and pay for the use of their work.
Anthropic said it disagreed with the publishers’ claims.
A spokesperson said: “We intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.”
The company is preparing for a potential stock market listing that could value it at around $2 trillion.
Anthropic sued by music publishers over alleged song theft
