Sony Music, Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic for Copyright Theft

On August 28, Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and several affiliated music publishers filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, naming co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants. The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic used torrent files, web scraping, downloads, and other methods on a massive scale to obtain copyrighted works for the development and operation of its Claude series models, describing this as an “outrageous” campaign of intellectual property theft. The complaint states that the training materials included millions of pirated books, some containing protected lyrics and sheet music. These allegations remain unproven at court. In response, Anthropic stated it disagrees with the publishers’ claims and will vigorously defend itself in court. This is not the first time the company has been involved in litigation over AI training data copyright. In previous class-action lawsuits involving authors such as Bartz, courts ruled that using lawfully obtained works to train models may constitute fair use, but obtaining works through piracy channels does not receive protection; subsequently, Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion settlement. The current case builds upon these precedents by further scrutinizing how training materials were acquired and their continued usage.