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Sony Music and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over Alleged Copyright Infringement of Tens of Thousands of Musical Works

Music publishers Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit in California against the AI company Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The plaintiffs allege that the company engaged in a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works to train its Claude AI models. Specifically, the publishers claim Anthropic used tens of thousands of copyrighted musical compositions without permission or licensing fees. The lawsuit includes popular works such as Mariah Carey’s "All I Want for Christmas is You" and Survivor’s "Eye of the Tiger." The publishers are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringed piece of work and $25,000 for each instance where identifying information was stripped from the songs. The lawsuit highlights that Benjamin Mann personally used BitTorrent to download millions of pirated books containing lyrics and sheet music. While Anthropic has previously settled a $1.5 billion lawsuit with book authors for similar piracy, the music publishers argue that the company is now being held accountable for the same datasets. An Anthropic spokesperson stated that the company disagrees with the publishers' claims and intends to defend itself robustly in court, citing training generative AI models as a transformative fair use.

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