Sony Music and Warner Chappell need Anthropic to pay up.
The publishing firms filed a lawsuit in opposition to Anthropic in a Northern California district courtroom on Friday. Anthropic cofounders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann had been additionally named within the submitting.
“Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have carried out a brazen marketing campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on an enormous scale as a way to develop, function, and reap huge earnings from Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ collection of synthetic intelligence (‘AI’) fashions,” the businesses mentioned within the grievance.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music mentioned Anthropic collected “1000’s upon 1000’s” of copyrighted songs, together with 80s anthem “Eye of the Tiger,” Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain Excessive Sufficient,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Need for Christmas is You,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.”
Within the lawsuit, the publishing firms mentioned Anthropic has pirated their copyrighted works by way of a spread of strategies, together with two digital archives, Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. In June 2025, a decide dominated that Anthropic downloaded over 7 million pirated books to coach Claude.
“Among the many many thousands and thousands of books that Defendants torrented from these unlawful pirate web sites had been books containing the lyrics and sheet music to a whole lot or extra of Music Publishers’ copyrighted musical compositions, recognized in Exhibit A. These works embrace ‘Livin’ On a Prayer,’ ‘September,’ ‘Nice Balls of Hearth,’ ‘Ramblin’ Man,’ and ‘Hallelujah,'” the lawsuit says.
Because of this, Claude models generate similar or near-identical copies of the copyrighted work of their responses to customers, the businesses alleged. Within the lawsuit, the businesses mentioned coaching Claude on copyrighted content material permits it to provide AI-generated lyrics that can finally compete with human-made songs.
Sony Music and Warner Chappell requested a jury trial. They’re looking for statutory damages from Anthropic, together with as much as $150,000 for every composition it used to coach Claude.
“Even essentially the most revolutionary of applied sciences should develop throughout the bounds of the regulation, and Anthropic’s Claude fashions aren’t any completely different,” the businesses mentioned within the grievance.
The AI trade has been focused by a slew of copyright lawsuits since giant language fashions like Claude and ChatGPT started to rework society.
Tech firms want troves of information to coach their AI fashions, and go to nice lengths to accumulate it. Most lately, historians and archivists have accused AI firms of buying giant numbers of vintage books and feeding them into their LLMs, destroying them within the course of.
Final September, Anthropic agreed to pay over $1.5 billion to authors to settle a class-action lawsuit associated to pirated works. OpenAI, too, has confronted several copyright lawsuits in recent times, together with one from The New York Occasions and one other from Encyclopedia Britannica.
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