This isn’t the first time music publishers have sued a big AI company, but the scale makes it worth your attention. Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed sweeping new lawsuits against Anthropic.
The publishers claim that Anthropic pirated tens of thousands of copyrighted songs to train Claude (via Business Insider). This chatbot has become quite popular for its accuracy and ability to handle complex tasks.
So what exactly do Sony and Warner claim?
The companies filed their 48-page lawsuit late Friday in federal court in Northern California, claiming this is one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property rights (protected by copyright and not allowed for commercial use without permission) in history.
The core claim, as mentioned in the lawsuit, is that Claude can reproduce near-identical or even identical copies of lyrics from copyrighted songs. Publishers argue that the output competes directly with the human-written songs the chatbot was trained on. It names Anthropic, along with CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann, as defendants.
Specific songs named in the filing span decades: Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings,” and Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
Sony and Warner claim Anthropic pulled lyrics and sheet music through pirate archives like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.
How big is the damage claim?
As mentioned in the lawsuit, both music publishers want a jury trial against Anthropic. Furthermore, the companies are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for every composition that has been plagiarized or copied.
I don’t want to overstate this, but $150,000 multiplied by the tens of thousands of songs allegedly pirated or used to train a chatbot adds up to a potentially eye-watering figure. While Anthropic hasn’t commented publicly on the lawsuit, we should expect a statement soon, given the sheer scale of claimed damages.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, this isn’t the first time a publisher has sued an AI company. Just recently, Anthropic agreed to pay authors and publishers $1.5 billion to settle a separate class-action lawsuit tied to pirated books, reportedly the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history at the time.
Music publisher BMG has also sued Anthropic separately, though that case covers a comparatively narrow 493 compositions next to this new suit’s far broader scope. And Anthropic isn’t alone. OpenAI has faced similar allegations in the past, from outlets including The New York Times and Encyclopedia Britannica.