Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and a coalition of other music publishers have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging the AI company engaged in a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works" to train its Claude series of artificial intelligence models. The lawsuit was filed late Friday in the S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The complaint asserts that Anthropic collected "thousands upon thousands" of copyrighted songs, including hits like "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." The publishers claim that Anthropic obtained these works through illegal means, including the use of the digital archives Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The lawsuit references a June 2025 court ruling that found Anthropic had downloaded over 7 million pirated books to train Claude, which allegedly included books containing lyrics and sheet music for hundreds of compositions.
According to the complaint, Claude models generate "identical or near-identical copies" of copyrighted works in responses to users. The publishers argue that training Claude on this content enables it to produce AI-generated lyrics that could compete with human-made songs, undermining the value of their copyrighted catalogs.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, along with the other plaintiffs, are seeking statutory damages for each copyrighted composition and have requested a jury trial. The amount sought is based on a per-composition basis, with the law allowing up to $150,000 per work.
Anthropic could not be reached for comment prior to publication. The case was first reported by Music Business Worldwide.
This lawsuit is not the first intellectual property challenge Anthropic has faced. Some of the same lawyers representing the music publishers also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a separate case filed in January, and they led the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which a group of authors accused Anthropic of using copyrighted works without permission. In that case, Anthropic was ordered to pay 5 billion after a judge ruled that while it was legal for the AI lab to use copyrighted works, it was not legal to acquire that content through piracy.
While the cases share similarities, this latest lawsuit is notably broad, accusing Anthropic of "flagrant piracy" through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including those containing lyrics and sheet music. The outcome of this case could have significant implications for how AI companies source training data and whether they must license copyrighted material.