Sony and Warner accuse Anthropic of mass song piracy
The publishers say Claude was trained on thousands of songs and lyrics scraped or torrented without permission, widening the copyright fight over AI models.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed suit in federal court in Northern California late Friday, naming Anthropic, chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The 48-page complaint accuses them of a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale” to build, run and profit from Claude, and says the alleged conduct amounts to “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”
As reported in August, Round Hill Music also sued Anthropic over songs, adding to a widening run of publisher cases against the company. Sony and Warner’s filing lands amid that broader fight over how AI systems are trained and monetized.
The publishers say the works at issue include songs such as “Eye of the Tiger,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “All I Want for Christmas is You” and “Paper Rings.” They are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, plus up to $25,000 for each alleged stripping of copyright management information. The Verge said the filing seeks damages for tens of thousands of copyrighted works.
The complaint says Anthropic and its founders pirated material using Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Music Business Worldwide reported that it alleges Mann used BitTorrent to download at least 5 million pirated books in 2021 and that Anthropic employees torrented at least 2 million more from Pirate Library Mirror in 2022. It also says the company scraped lyrics from licensed services including MusixMatch and LyricFind, and that Claude can reproduce lyrics verbatim.
Anthropic rejected the allegations and said it intends to defend itself robustly in court. The complaint also says the model’s guardrails are “easily circumventable by simply ‘re-prompting’” it, and Axios described the suit as broad and as an opening salvo in a likely yearslong fight over music, AI and intellectual property.