Sony Music and Warner Chappell want Anthropic to pay.
The publishers filed a lawsuit against Anthropic on Friday in a district court in Northern California. Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei And Benjamin Mann were also mentioned in the file.
“Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann engaged in a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale to develop, exploit, and reap vast profits from Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ series of artificial intelligence (“AI”) models,” the companies said in the complaint.
Anthropic denied the allegations in a statement. “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in court,” the company said.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music said Anthropic has collected “thousands and thousands” of copyrighted songs, including the ’80s anthem “Eye of the Tiger,” Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.”
In the lawsuit, the publishers said Anthropic did that their copyrighted works pirated through a range of methods including two digital archives, Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. In June 2025, a judge ruled that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million pirated books to train Claude.
“Among the many millions of books that Defendants torrented from these illegal pirate websites were books containing the lyrics and sheet music of hundreds or more copyrighted musical compositions from music publishers, identified in Exhibit A. These works include ‘Livin’ On a Prayer,’ ‘September,’ ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ ‘Ramblin’ Man’ and ‘Hallelujah,'” the lawsuit said.
As a result Claude models generate identical or nearly identical copies of the copyrighted work in their responses to users, the companies claimed. In the lawsuit, the companies said that training Claude on copyrighted content will allow him to produce AI-generated lyrics that will eventually compete with human-made songs.
Sony Music and Warner Chappell requested a jury trial. They are seeking statutory damages from Anthropic, including up to $150,000 for each composition used to train Claude.
“Even the most revolutionary technologies must develop within the boundaries of the law, and Anthropic’s Claude models are no different,” the companies said in the complaint.
The AI industry has been the target of a slew of copyright lawsuits since major language models like Claude and ChatGPT began transforming society.
Technology companies need large amounts of data to train their AI models, and are doing everything they can to acquire it. Recently, historians and archivists have accused AI companies of acquiring large numbers of ancient books and importing them into their LLMs, destroying them in the process.
Last September, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion for authors to settle a class action lawsuit regarding illegal works. OpenAI has also had to deal with this various copyright cases in recent years, including one from The New York Times and another from Encyclopedia Britannica.
