Sony, Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic for Pirated Lyrics, Seek $150K Per Song

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic and its founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, in a Northern California federal court on Friday. The publishing giants allege that Anthropic systematically scraped, torrented, and downloaded vast quantities of copyrighted musical compositions and sheet music to train its Claude large language models without authorization or compensation. According to the complaint, Anthropic acquired thousands of protected works through digital archives, including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The filing cites specific examples spanning decades of popular music, such as 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, and Taylor Swift’s Paper Rings. The plaintiffs assert that the defendants utilized these illicit sources to amass training data, a practice previously documented in a June 2025 ruling that confirmed Anthropic had downloaded over seven million pirated books to fuel its AI development. Sony and Warner Chappell contend that this unauthorized data collection has direct commercial consequences, alleging that Claude models routinely generate identical or near-identical lyrics when prompted. The publishers argue that this capability enables Anthropic to produce AI-generated compositions that directly compete with human-created songs, undermining traditional music licensing markets. The companies have formally requested a jury trial and are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per copyrighted composition used in the training process. The lawsuit underscores the accelerating legal friction between the AI sector and content rights holders. Despite Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors last September over pirated literary works, publishers maintain that generative AI developers continue to operate outside established copyright frameworks. Industry-wide, major technology firms face mounting litigation over data acquisition practices, with OpenAI simultaneously defending against similar claims from The New York Times and Encyclopedia Britannica. The plaintiffs emphasize in their filing that technological innovation must remain constrained by existing intellectual property laws, regardless of an AI system’s transformative potential. As regulatory scrutiny intensifies, the outcome of this case will likely establish critical precedents for how artificial intelligence companies are permitted to source and utilize copyrighted creative works.