Overview
- Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed the federal complaint late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and named Anthropic plus co‑founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants.
- The suit alleges Anthropic ran a ‘‘brazen campaign’’ of illegal torrenting and scraping that pulled lyrics and related works from sources such as Library Genesis, Pirate Library Mirror, MusixMatch, and LyricFind.
- Plaintiffs say Claude’s training data contains ‘‘tens of thousands’’ of copyrighted songs and cite examples like "Ain’t No Mountain High Enough," "Livin’ On a Prayer," "September," "Hallelujah," and "Paper Rings."
- The publishers seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work plus up to $25,000 for alleged removal of copyright information and they ask for injunctions and accounting or destruction of infringing copies.
- Anthropic says it disagrees and will defend itself, but the new suit follows a $1.5 billion authors’ settlement and multiple prior music suits and could force courts to set new rules on how AI firms acquire and license training data.