Sony accuses Anthropic of 'brazen campaign' to train Claude on its music — and wants up to $150,000 a song

Sony Music and Warner Chappell want Anthropic to salary up.

The publishing companies revenge a suit against Anthropic successful a Northern California territory tribunal connected Friday. Anthropic cofounders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann were besides named successful the filing.

"Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann person conducted a brazen run of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted useful connected a monolithic standard successful bid to develop, operate, and reap tremendous profits from Anthropic's 'Claude' bid of artificial intelligence ('AI') models," the companies said successful the complaint.

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music said Anthropic collected "thousands upon thousands" of copyrighted songs, including 80s anthem "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."

In the lawsuit, the publishing companies said Anthropic has pirated their copyrighted works done a scope of methods, including 2 integer archives, Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. In June 2025, a judge ruled that Anthropic downloaded complete 7 cardinal pirated books to train Claude.

"Among the galore millions of books that Defendants torrented from these forbidden pirate websites were books containing the lyrics and expanse euphony to hundreds aliases much of Music Publishers' copyrighted philharmonic compositions, identified successful Exhibit A. Those useful see 'Livin' On a Prayer,' 'September,' 'Great Balls of Fire,' 'Ramblin' Man,' and 'Hallelujah,'" the suit says.

As a result, Claude models make identical aliases near-identical copies of the copyrighted activity successful their responses to users, the companies alleged. In the lawsuit, the companies said training Claude connected copyrighted contented allows it to nutrient AI-generated lyrics that will yet compete pinch human-made songs.

Sony Music and Warner Chappell requested a assemblage trial. They're seeking statutory damages from Anthropic, including up to $150,000 for each creation it utilized to train Claude.

"Even the astir revolutionary of technologies must create wrong the bounds of the law, and Anthropic's Claude models are nary different," the companies said successful the complaint.

The AI manufacture has been targeted by a slew of copyright lawsuits since ample connection models for illustration Claude and ChatGPT began to toggle shape society.

Tech companies request troves of information to train their AI models, and spell to awesome lengths to get it. Most recently, historians and archivists person accused AI companies of acquiring ample numbers of ancient books and feeding them into their LLMs, destroying them successful the process.

Last September, Anthropic agreed to salary complete $1.5 cardinal to authors to settee a class-action suit related to pirated works. OpenAI, too, has faced several copyright lawsuits successful caller years, including 1 from The New York Times and different from Encyclopedia Britannica.