Anthropic Sued by Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Over Alleged Use of Tens of Thousands of Songs to Train Claude AI
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Music publishers Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have sued Anthropic, accusing the artificial intelligence company of using a massive library of copyrighted songs without permission to help train its Claude chatbot models.
The complaint says the company copied and processed “tens of thousands” of musical compositions, including Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is YouAin’t No Mountain High EnoughEye of the Tiger, and other well-known tracks. The publishers say that kind of use was not incidental; they argue Anthropic built value from works it did not license.
They are asking a California court for damages that could climb into the billions of dollars.
How the lawsuit says the songs were gathered
The complaint accuses Anthropic, chief executive Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann of breaching copyright law by torrenting, scraping, and downloading lyrics to train the Claude family of models. It also says the company reproduced some of those lyrics in responses to user prompts.
According to the filing, the company and Mann allegedly downloaded at least 7 million books from pirate websites, a trove that the publishers say included lyrics and sheet music for songs such as Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. The publishers also say Anthropic pulled lyrics from legal services such as Musixmatch and LyricFind, along with archive-style datasets including Common Crawl.
The suit says identifying information was stripped from songs during processing, which the publishers argue deprived copyright owners of attribution and control.
Why the publishers say the case is so large
The publishers describe the dispute as one of the biggest ongoing thefts of intellectual property they have seen, saying at least 20,000 works are implicated and that the copying involved “tens of thousands” of copyrighted compositions.
The damages theory is aggressive. The complaint points to a possible award of up to $150,000 for each infringed work, plus $25,000 for every removal or alteration of identifying data, which is how the claim reaches the multibillion-dollar range.
The filing was submitted on August 28 and was first reported by Music Business Worldwide. The case adds to a growing list of copyright fights around artificial intelligence, including prior claims against Anthropic by U.S. authors and separate disputes involving Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group.
What Anthropic says happens next
Anthropic said it disagrees with the publishers’ claims and plans to defend itself strongly in court. The company is also preparing for a stock market listing that could value it at $2 trillion, raising the stakes around one of the most closely watched AI copyright battles in the United States.
The lawsuit lands as other AI and music companies face similar scrutiny. In a separate case this month, AI music generator Suno lost a copyright infringement case against Germany’s licensing agency GEMA, which alleged unauthorized training use of songs including Boney M’s Daddy Cool.
For musicians, songwriters, and publishers, the Anthropic case could help define how far AI companies can go when building models from copyrighted material and what they may owe rights holders if courts side with the music industry.
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