Last month, Anthropic was at the center of public backlash for a plan, called Project Panama, to \u201cdestructively scan all the books in the world\u201d to train its Claude AI models. Now the AI company finds itself again facing the (copyright) music.<\/p>\n
\n
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic, naming CEO Dario Amodei and cofounder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants, for what the suit characterizes as illegally downloading, scraping, and torrenting \u201cthousands upon thousands\u201d of copyrighted songs to train its AI models.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Northern California, alleges that Anthropic obtained lyrics and sheet music through pirate sources including Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror, and, according to the complaint, scraped licensed lyric websites, such as Musixmatch and LyricFind. The publishers allege the material was then incorporated into Claude\u2019s training data and that the model can reproduce copyrighted lyrics.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn blatant violation of copyright law, Defendants have unlawfully acquired troves of Music Publishers\u2019 musical compositions, and then systematically copied those works multiple times,\u201d the filing read, \u201cincluding as the inputs to train Anthropic\u2019s Claude AI models and in the outputs those models generate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scraping and distributing Musixmatch content violates the site\u2019s user agreement, and LyricFind\u2019s privacy policy similarly prohibits reproduction \u201cunless otherwise stated,\u201d the suit says.<\/p>\n
Sony and Warner are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each song the court finds Anthropic to have infringed willfully. They are also seeking as much as $25,000 for each instance in which copyright-management information was allegedly removed from a work. With the complaint covering at least \u201cthousands if not tens of thousands\u201d of works, the potential damages could reach into the billions of dollars.<\/p>\n
Among the songs named in the complaint are Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell\u2019s \u201cAin\u2019t No Mountain High Enough,\u201d Mariah Carey\u2019s \u201cAll I Want for Christmas Is You,\u201d Survivor\u2019s \u201cEye of the Tiger,\u201d Leonard Cohen\u2019s \u201cHallelujah,\u201d Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars\u2019 \u201cUptown Funk,\u201d the Beatles\u2019 \u201cI Am the Walrus,\u201d and Taylor Swift\u2019s \u201cPaper Rings\u201d and \u201cCruel Summer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anthropic rejected the allegations and said the company will \u201cdefend ourselves robustly\u201d in court.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts,\u201d an Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune<\/em>.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s true that Anthropic has some history with the law firm: Oppenheim and Zebrak, which represents Sony and Warner in the new suit, first sued Anthropic in October 2023 alongside Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO over roughly 500 songs. The same publishers filed a second suit through the same firm in January, covering more than 20,000 works and seeking over $3 billion. BMG and Round Hill Music have also sued Anthropic over music this year, but with different counsel\u2014putting the total number of music-copyright suits against the company at five.<\/p>\n
Anthropic\u2019s other copyright fights\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\nAnthropic points to Bartz <\/em>v. Anthropic<\/em> as precedent for its fair use in using human-made work to train its models. The company says \u201ctraining generative AI models is a transformative fair use\u2014as the court held in Bartz<\/em>,\u201d highlighting the judge\u2019s ruling on the use of copyrighted works.<\/p>\n\u201cIn short, the purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative,\u201d Judge William Alsup wrote in June 2025 regarding the case. \u201cLike any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic\u2019s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them\u2014but to turn a hard corner and create something different.\u201d<\/p>\n
The AI company settled in September 2025 for $1.5 billion with the owners of the copyrighted works. But Sony and Warner said it wasn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright theft,\u201d the new Sony and Warner complaint read. \u201cAnd $1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation,\u201d the complaint stated, referencing Anthropic\u2019s IPO target.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the process of building and operating AI models, Anthropic unlawfully copies and disseminates vast amounts of copyrighted works\u2014including the lyrics to myriad musical compositions owned or controlled by Publishers,\u201d the lawsuit filing read.<\/p>\n
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell did not immediately respond to Fortune<\/em>\u2018s requests for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n#Sony #Warner #Music #sue #Anthropic #alleged #theft #tens #thousands #songs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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