Sony Music and Warner Chappell want Anthropic to pay up.
The publishing companies filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in a Northern California district court on Friday. Anthropic cofounders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann were also named in the filing.
“Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ series of artificial intelligence (‘AI’) models,” the companies said in the complaint.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music said Anthropic collected “thousands upon thousands” of copyrighted songs, including 80s anthem “Eye of the Tiger,” Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.”
In the lawsuit, the publishing companies said Anthropic has pirated their copyrighted works through a range of methods, including two digital archives, Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. In June 2025, a judge ruled that Anthropic downloaded over 7 million pirated books to train Claude.
“Among the many millions of books that Defendants torrented from these illegal pirate websites were books containing the lyrics and sheet music to hundreds or more of Music Publishers’ copyrighted musical compositions, identified in Exhibit A. Those works include ‘Livin’ On a Prayer,’ ‘September,’ ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ ‘Ramblin’ Man,’ and ‘Hallelujah,'” the lawsuit says.
As a result, Claude models generate identical or near-identical copies of the copyrighted work in their responses to users, the companies alleged. In the lawsuit, the companies said training Claude on copyrighted content allows it to produce AI-generated lyrics that will ultimately compete with human-made songs.
Sony Music and Warner Chappell requested a jury trial. They’re seeking statutory damages from Anthropic, including up to $150,000 for each composition it used to train Claude.
“Even the most revolutionary of technologies must develop within the bounds of the law, and Anthropic’s Claude models are no different,” the companies said in the complaint.
The AI industry has been targeted by a slew of copyright lawsuits since large language models like Claude and ChatGPT began to transform society.
Tech companies need troves of data to train their AI models, and go to great lengths to acquire it. Most recently, historians and archivists have accused AI companies of acquiring large numbers of antique books and feeding them into their LLMs, destroying them in the process.
Last September, Anthropic agreed to pay over $1.5 billion to authors to settle a class-action lawsuit related to pirated works. OpenAI, too, has faced several copyright lawsuits in recent years, including one from The New York Times and another from Encyclopedia Britannica.
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