Music Publishers Sue Anthropic Over Copyrighted Song Training

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a federal lawsuit against Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The publishers allege the AI company conducted a "brazen campaign" of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading thousands of copyrighted musical compositions to train the Claude AI model. The complaint specifically cites the unauthorized use of works by artists such as Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey, and Marvin Gaye, as well as songs like "Eye of the Tiger," sourced from repositories including MusixMatch, LyricFind, and the Pirate Library Mirror.

The plaintiffs are seeking a jury trial and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work, a figure that could total billions of dollars. This litigation follows a pattern of legal challenges against the company by other industry players, including Universal Music Publishing Group, BMG, and Concord Music Group. It also comes after Anthropic paid $1.5 billion to settle a separate dispute involving the use of pirated books for AI training.

Anthropic has denied the allegations, arguing that the training of generative AI models constitutes "transformative fair use." The company further claimed the lawsuit recycles allegations from previous cases already before the courts and stated its intention to defend itself robustly.