Sony and Warner sue Anthropic over alleged mass song copyright infringement

  • Sony and Warner sued Anthropic, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann over alleged song-copyright violations.
  • $150,000 per song and $25,000 per alleged information-removal violation are sought.
  • Anthropic faces five music-copyright lawsuits after earlier publisher actions and a $1.5 billion settlement.

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging the company illegally downloaded, scraped and torrented thousands or tens of thousands of copyrighted musical works to train Claude. The publishers say Anthropic obtained lyrics and sheet music from pirate sources including Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror, while also scraping licensed lyric sites such as Musixmatch and LyricFind. They allege the material was incorporated into Claude's training data and that the model can reproduce copyrighted lyrics. Sony and Warner seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 per song for willful infringement and as much as $25,000 for each alleged removal of copyright-management information, potentially creating billions of dollars in exposure. Anthropic said it would defend itself robustly and called the complaint the third lawsuit from the same lawyers recycling allegations already before courts. The case follows earlier music-copyright suits, a $1.5 billion settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic involving copyrighted works, and Anthropic's broader legal dispute over AI training data. The publishers argue that settlement did not sufficiently deter infringement; the complaint references a $2 trillion IPO valuation target, while existing records cite a $65 billion financing at a $965 billion valuation.

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