Sony Music and Warner Chappell Are Suing Anthropic Over Song Lyrics

Anthropic's legal troubles just got a new soundtrack. On August 28, Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music and dozens of affiliated publishers filed a sweeping copyright lawsuit against the AI company in the Northern District of California, unusually naming CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants alongside the company itself.

The 48-page complaint accuses Anthropic of building its Claude models on a foundation of pirated material, and the publishers don't mince words, describing the alleged conduct as one of the "largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." A few details stand out from the filing:

• Plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per composition, a figure that could run into the billions given the volume of songs named
• The suit references pirate sources including Library Genesis as an alleged origin point for scraped lyrics and sheet music
• It also targets Common Crawl, The Pile, and secondhand books the publishers say were digitized and destroyed in the process

This isn't Anthropic's first brush with the music industry — Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord and ABKCO sued the company back in 2023 — but it marks the first time all three major music groups have publishing arms actively litigating against Claude's maker, following a similar suit from independent publisher Round Hill Music earlier this month.

The case lands just weeks after Anthropic finalized a separate $1.5 billion settlement with authors over similar training-data claims, suggesting the company's legal exposure around how it sourced content for Claude is far from resolved.