Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a major copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, in one of the most consequential legal confrontations yet between the music industry and generative AI.
The two publishers, along with Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann named individually, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. They accuse the Claude maker of running a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works” to train its AI models, without seeking authorization or licensing. The complaint doesn’t mince words, calling it “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history,” and alleges thousands of copyrighted musical compositions were swept up in the process, including well-known songs such as “Eye of the Tiger” and Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”
Sony and Warner Chappell are seeking a jury trial, along with statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work found to be infringed, plus additional damages for any instances where copyright management information was stripped out. Given the scale of works allegedly involved, total damages could run into the billions. Anthropic has pushed back firmly, telling reporters in a statement: “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.”
This isn’t Anthropic’s first brush with the music industry over training data. The company already faces earlier lawsuits from Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO, as well as separate suits from BMG and Round Hill Music. It also follows a related, high-profile case brought by authors, which ended in a $1.5 billion settlement after a court found that while training AI on copyrighted books was legal, acquiring those books through piracy was not, a distinction this new complaint leans on directly, arguing that settlement wasn’t steep enough to change Anthropic’s behavior.
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