Sony Music and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic

Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a major copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The music publishers accuse the AI startup of using "tens of thousands" of copyrighted works without permission to train its Claude series of artificial intelligence models. The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, alongside up to $25,000 for every instance where identifiable copyright management information was stripped. If the court awards the maximum amounts, the total financial penalty could easily reach several billion dollars.

The legal complaint names Anthropic as an entity and specifically targets co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. According to the filing, Mann allegedly used BitTorrent to download more than five million pirated books, while other Anthropic employees downloaded at least two million additional books from the Pirate Library Mirror. Furthermore, the suit claims the company scraped lyrics from licensed platforms like MusixMatch and LyricFind. The publishers identified several iconic songs within Claude's training data, including Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings," Bon Jovi's "Livin' On a Prayer," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," and Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough."

This litigation represents an escalating legal battle for Anthropic, which recently resolved a separate lawsuit with the publishing industry via a $1.5 billion settlement. The company is also navigating active legal challenges from other major music entities, including Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music. For AI practitioners and enterprise developers, this wave of high-stakes litigation underscores the growing compliance risks of deploying large language models. If courts rule against Anthropic, developers may face stricter auditing of training datasets, higher licensing costs, and potential service disruptions if certain models are forced offline due to copyright violations.