Sony, Warner Sue Anthropic Over AI Song Training

What happened

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a joint lawsuit against Anthropic in federal court in Northern California, accusing the AI company of illegally downloading, scraping and torrenting tens of thousands of copyrighted song compositions to train its Claude models. The complaint names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants alongside the company itself.

According to the filing, Anthropic obtained lyrics and sheet music through pirate sources including Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror, and separately scraped licensed lyric websites such as Musixmatch and LyricFind. The publishers allege that material from artists including The Beatles, Taylor Swift and Michael Jackson made its way into Claude's training data and that the model can reproduce copyrighted lyrics on request.

Why it matters

The lawsuit is notable for its scale. While earlier music-industry suits against Anthropic, including one from BMG covering 493 compositions, focused on a narrower set of works, the Sony and Warner complaint alleges infringement across thousands upon thousands of copyrighted compositions, exposing the company to potentially billions of dollars in statutory damages.

The case adds to a broader legal reckoning facing AI companies over how they source training data. Anthropic became the first major AI lab to settle a similar dispute last year, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to resolve a class action brought by authors and publishers, the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history at the time.

Evidence and context

The complaint alleges that in mid-2021, Mann used BitTorrent to download at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis, and that Anthropic employees separately torrented at least two million more works from the Pirate Library Mirror the following year. The publishers argue those actions amounted to a deliberate, large-scale piracy campaign rather than incidental data collection.

Sony and Warner are represented by Oppenheim + Zebrak, the same firm that filed earlier suits on behalf of Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group, one of which is still pending and seeks more than $3 billion in damages. An Anthropic spokesperson described the new suit as recycling allegations from cases already before the courts.

One of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.

— from the Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell complaint

The people and places affected

The suit lands amid a broader wave of litigation from music rights holders, including BMG and Round Hill Music, each pursuing separate claims against Anthropic this year. Because a single song can carry multiple layers of copyright, covering lyrics, composition and sound recording, that are often owned by different rights holders, AI companies face the prospect of facing several overlapping lawsuits over the same material.

For songwriters and publishers, the case is being framed as a test of whether AI companies can be forced to pay for the material that trains their models, rather than settling only after being caught, a dynamic Sony and Warner's complaint suggests has become a routine cost of doing business for Anthropic.

The open questions

It remains to be seen how the case will be affected by an earlier court ruling in the authors' litigation, which found it was legal for Anthropic to train on copyrighted works but not legal to acquire that material through piracy, a distinction that could shape how this case unfolds.

Also unresolved is how courts will handle the growing number of parallel music-industry suits against Anthropic, several of which involve overlapping claims and could eventually be consolidated or decided in tandem.

What comes next

Sony and Warner have demanded a jury trial and are seeking a court order barring Anthropic from further use of their works, along with an accounting of Claude's training data and destruction of any infringing copies still held by the company.

The case is expected to move through pretrial proceedings over the coming months, with its outcome likely to influence how other AI companies approach licensing deals with music publishers going forward.