Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California late on Friday, alleging that the company systematically pirated musical compositions, lyrics, and scores to train its Claude artificial intelligence models.
The complaint names Anthropic's chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants alongside the company. The publishers say the number of affected songs runs into the thousands.
The publishers are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work wilfully infringed.
Anthropic said: "We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court."
The complaint describes three channels through which Anthropic allegedly obtained protected material: employees torrenting pirated books containing pop music scores and lyrics from illicit sites; staff scanning physical books the company had purchased; and mass-scraping data from websites in violation of their terms of service. The publishers specifically allege that Benjamin Mann used BitTorrent to obtain copyrighted material.
Sony and Warner also allege that Anthropic systematically manipulated or deleted copyright management information to conceal the fact of illegal copying. The publishers further allege that copyrighted material was copied multiple times: once as training data fed into Claude and again when the model reproduces lyrics in response to user queries.
Among the copyrighted works identified in the complaint are Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You", Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings", Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", and Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer".
The publishers characterise the conduct as a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works". They are demanding the permanent destruction of all illegally copied lyric databases and training files in Anthropic's possession.
With this filing, publishers linked to all three major music companies are now in litigation against Anthropic. Some of the same lawyers behind this action also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a separate case filed in January.
The legal team previously led the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which a judge ruled that while it was legal for an AI company to use copyrighted works in training, acquiring that content through piracy was illegal. Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in that case.
The music publishers' suit applies the same legal framework to the music industry. The central questions before the court will be whether Anthropic knowingly sourced pirated material, whether the company took active steps to obscure that fact by stripping copyright metadata, and whether the scale of alleged infringement justifies the damages the publishers are seeking.
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