Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over alleged copyright piracy

  • Sony Music and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic and co-founders over copyright.
  • Publishers seek up to $150,000 per work for tens of thousands of songs.
  • Anthropic denies allegations after settling authors' suit for $1.5 billion.

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann in California federal court, accusing the AI company of pirating tens of thousands of copyrighted compositions—including works tied to Mariah Carey, Taylor Swift, Marvin Gaye and other artists—to train its Claude models. The 48-page complaint alleges Anthropic obtained lyrics and sheet music through digital piracy archives such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, enabling Claude to reproduce near-identical copies and generate AI lyrics that compete with human-created songs, and seeks a jury trial with statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed composition, plus further relief over alleged copyright management information removal, an order barring further use, and destruction of related training data. Anthropic denied the allegations and said it intends to defend itself robustly in court. The case follows Anthropic’s September 2025 agreement to pay $1.5 billion to settle an authors’ class action after a judicial finding that obtaining works through piracy was unlawful even where training use itself was not, draws on evidence from that earlier litigation, and sits alongside a separate BMG suit claiming infringement of 493 compositions and an ongoing Universal Music Group lyrics case.

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