Anthropic Sued By Sony Music, Warner Chappell Music, Other Music Publishers Over Alleged Mass...

Anthropic has been sued by Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music and other major music publishers, which accuse the artificial intelligence company of illegally obtaining and using thousands of copyrighted musical works to train its Claude AI models.

The publishers filed the lawsuit Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, naming Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants. They accused the AI company and its founders of conducting what they described as a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works" on a massive scale.

The case adds the music industry to a growing legal battle over how AI companies obtain the enormous quantities of copyrighted material needed to train generative AI systems.

"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 publishers said in the complaint.

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell said Anthropic obtained "thousands upon thousands" of copyrighted songs, including "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."

The publishers allege that Anthropic acquired copyrighted material through several sources, including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, two digital archives that have been associated with pirated books and other content.

The lawsuit builds on an earlier copyright case against Anthropic involving books. In June 2025, a federal judge ruled that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million pirated books to train Claude.

The music publishers argue that those books also contained lyrics and sheet music belonging to their catalogues. They identified works including Bon Jovi's "Livin' On a Prayer," Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire," the Allman Brothers Band's "Ramblin' Man," and Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

According to the complaint, the alleged infringement goes beyond the use of copyrighted works during model training. The publishers claim Claude can generate identical or nearly identical versions of copyrighted material in response to users' prompts.

That allegation could become crucial because the case raises two separate questions for the AI industry: whether copyrighted works can lawfully be used to train AI models and whether AI systems can reproduce protected works closely enough to constitute infringement when responding to users.

The publishers argue that training Claude on copyrighted compositions enables Anthropic to generate lyrics that could compete directly with music created by human songwriters.

"Even the most revolutionary of technologies must develop within the bounds of the law, and Anthropic's Claude models are no different," the publishers said in the complaint.

They are seeking statutory damages and have requested a jury trial. Under U.S. copyright law, statutory damages can reach $150,000 per infringed work when the infringement is found to be willful. The potential exposure could therefore become substantial if the publishers succeed in establishing infringement across a large catalogue.

The lawsuit marks another escalation in the confrontation between copyright owners and AI companies over training data.

Generative AI systems require enormous datasets to develop their capabilities, creating a direct conflict with industries whose books, articles, photographs, music and other creative works form part of the material that AI companies seek to acquire.

For the music industry, the dispute has implications beyond compensation. Publishers and songwriters are becoming more concerned that generative AI could become a competitor to the very creators whose work helped train the systems.

The legal strategy also comes at a time when Anthropic is already facing significant financial exposure from copyright litigation. In September, the company agreed to pay more than $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by authors over the use of pirated books.

Other major AI companies have faced similar lawsuits. OpenAI has been sued by publishers and content owners, including The New York Times and Encyclopedia Britannica, over allegations concerning the use of copyrighted material to train and operate its AI systems.

The cases could ultimately help determine the economics of the AI industry. If courts require companies to obtain licenses for large quantities of copyrighted training material, the cost of developing and operating AI models could rise substantially. If courts allow broader use of copyrighted material under fair use or other legal doctrines, publishers, authors, musicians and other rights holders could face greater pressure to adapt their business models.

The Anthropic case could be especially consequential because music is subject to multiple layers of copyright protection, including rights in compositions and, in many cases, separate rights in sound recordings. A ruling against Anthropic could therefore have implications for how AI companies collect, process, and reproduce musical content at scale.