Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a joint copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging the AI lab illegally torrented, scraped, and downloaded tens of thousands of copyrighted songs to train its Claude large language models1,2,3.
The suit, filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks up to $150,000 per copyrighted work and up to $25,000 for each instance in which identifiable copyright data was stripped. If a court finds in the publishers' favor and awards the maximum, total damages could reach several billion dollars.
Numerous other music publishers joined Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music in the action. The complaint accuses Anthropic of illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including books containing lyrics and sheet music. Some of the same lawyers behind this suit also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a separate case filed in January.
The lawsuit lands weeks after a federal judge vacated the Pentagon's national-security blacklisting of Anthropic ctx, and on the same day reports surfaced that Anthropic had explored a roughly $7 billion acquisition of AI chip startup MatX ctx.
Anthropic already carries a landmark copyright liability. In the earlier Bartz v. Anthropic case, a group of authors accused the company of using copyrighted works to train Claude. A judge ruled that while using copyrighted works for AI training was legal, acquiring that content through piracy was not, and ordered Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion.
ANALYSIS The new music-industry suit extends the legal theory validated in Bartz, targeting the acquisition method rather than the act of training itself, and applies it to a content category with statutory damages that scale with the number of individual works.
Anthropic could not be reached for comment prior to publication, according to TechCrunch. The lawsuit was first reported by Music Business Worldwide.