Music Publishers Sue Anthropic for Copyrighting Song Lyrics

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The publishers allege the AI company conducted a campaign of intellectual property theft by illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading thousands of copyrighted musical compositions and lyrics to train the Claude AI model.

Plaintiffs claim Anthropic scraped repositories such as MusixMatch and LyricFind to obtain works including Eye of the Tiger and Ain't No Mountain High Enough. The publishers are seeking a jury trial and statutory damages of $150,000 per infringement, a figure that could total billions of dollars.

This litigation follows a pattern of legal challenges for the company, including previous lawsuits from Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music. Anthropic previously paid $1.5 billion in the Bartz v. Anthropic case after a judge ruled that using pirated books for training data was illegal. Anthropic has denied the current allegations and stated it intends to defend itself in court.