Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over alleged mass song piracy

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and cofounder Benjamin Mann, alleging that Claude was built and operated using tens of thousands of copyrighted songs without permission.

Tim Ingham reports for Music Business Worldwide that the case was filed in federal court in Northern California. It adds Sony and Warner’s publishing divisions to a growing group of music rightsholders taking Anthropic to court.

The publishers seek up to $150,000 in statutory damages for every work they say was willfully infringed. They also seek up to $25,000 per alleged removal of copyright management information. With “tens of thousands” of compositions named or covered by the complaint, the claimed potential exposure could reach billions of dollars.

The lawsuit names songs including “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” “Eye of the Tiger,” “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “September,” “Hallelujah,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.” Sony and Warner allege that Anthropic copied the works for Claude’s training data and that the model can reproduce lyrics verbatim in its responses.

Claims against Anthropic and its founders

The complaint alleges that Mann downloaded at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis in 2021, while Anthropic employees allegedly downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror in 2022. It relies in part on evidence and findings from the separate Bartz v. Anthropic litigation involving book authors.

Sony and Warner also accuse Anthropic of scraping lyrics from licensed services, including MusixMatch and LyricFind, and of using datasets such as Common Crawl, The Pile, and Books3. Anthropic has not been quoted in the report responding to the new complaint.

The publishers request a jury trial, destruction of infringing copies, and an accounting of Claude’s training data. They argue that safeguards Anthropic added after earlier music litigation can be bypassed through revised prompts.