Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over copyright infringement
Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed suit against AI company Anthropic, accusing it of illegally using tens of thousands of copyrighted songs to train its Claude models. Damages could reach several billion dollars.
Music industry giants Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The companies are seeking damages for the alleged unauthorized use of "tens of thousands" of copyrighted works.
The plaintiffs are asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus an additional $25,000 for each instance in which identifiable copyright data was stripped from the material. If a court rules in the music companies' favor and awards the maximum amount, total damages could reach several billion dollars.
This is only the latest high-profile legal action against Anthropic, which recently settled a lawsuit brought by the publishing industry for $1.5 billion. The company has also faced separate suits from Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO, as well as from BMG and Round Hill Music.
Along with Anthropic itself, the complaint names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. It alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download more than five million pirated books, while other employees downloaded at least two million more from a site called Pirate Library Mirror. The suit further claims Anthropic scraped song lyrics from sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, both of which had paid to license the content from record labels.
Specific examples cited
The complaint lists several specific songs allegedly found in Anthropic's training data, including Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Bon Jovi's "Livin' On a Prayer," Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings." The music publishers describe the case as one of the largest and most blatant thefts of intellectual property in history. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
