Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic and two of its co-founders, accusing the Claude maker of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale to build its AI models.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, also names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann individually as defendants. The 35 music publishers behind the suit describe Anthropic's conduct as a "brazen campaign" of copyright infringement.
The complaint alleges Anthropic obtained and copied tens of thousands of protected musical compositions for use in training Claude, including works such as "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "All I Want for Christmas is You," "Eye of the Tiger," "Hallelujah" and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings."
The complaint's most pointed allegations build on facts that were disclosed in an earlier copyright case against Anthropic. The publishers allege Mann used BitTorrent in 2021 to download at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis at Amodei's direction, while Anthropic employees downloaded another two million from Pirate Library Mirror the following year. Some of those books allegedly contained copyrighted lyrics and sheet music owned by the plaintiffs.
The lawsuit also accuses Anthropic of scraping lyrics from licensed sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, along with scanning and destroying books and removing copyright-management information from text before it's used in model training. The publishers further allege that Claude can reproduce verbatim or nearly verbatim copies of lyrics to songs the publishers own in response to user prompts.
A familiar copyright fight
Sony and Warner's lawsuit leans heavily on that earlier copyright case, Bartz v. Anthropic, in which a federal judge ruled last year that using legally acquired books to train an AI model could qualify as fair use, but Anthropic's acquisition and retention of millions of pirated books in a permanent internal library did not.
Anthropic later agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle claims stemming from the pirated copies. However, the new music-publisher lawsuit argues that the settlement failed to deter the company from copyright-infringing conduct.
Sony and Warner are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work they say was willfully infringed, plus up to $25,000 for alleged removals of copyright-management information, a sum that could stretch into the billions of dollars if the lawsuit goes their way. The plaintiffs are also asking the court to order Anthropic to destroy its infringing copies of copyrighted works and to provide a full accounting of the material used to train Claude.
The lawsuit sees Sony and Warner's publishing arms join a growing group of music companies and publishers litigating against Anthropic. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord and ABKCO have previously sued the company, while BMG and Round Hill Music have brought separate cases.
"We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court," an Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch.
This latest legal challenge lands as Anthropic prepares for a potential public listing, pitching investors on the increasingly large market for its Claude models. The Latent reported last week that the company plans to present investors with a total addressable market of more than $30 trillion ahead of its expected IPO.