Overview
- Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed a 48-page federal complaint Friday, Aug. 28, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California accusing Anthropic and founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann of using tens of thousands of copyrighted lyrics and sheet music to train Claude.
- The publishers allege Anthropic acquired material from pirate libraries and torrent downloads such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, used public datasets and scraped licensed lyric services including Musixmatch and LyricFind while allegedly stripping copyright-management metadata.
- Sony and Warner are seeking statutory damages up to $150,000 per willful infringement and up to $25,000 for each alleged removal of copyright-management information, plus injunctive relief, disclosure of training data and court-ordered destruction of infringing copies.
- Anthropic denies the claims, says it will defend itself robustly and points to a prior court ruling and its $1.5 billion settlement with authors as part of the legal backdrop that treats lawful training as possible fair use but distinguishes piracy-based acquisition.
- If courts accept the publishers’ theories, rulings could force commercial AI firms to license training material, raise model-building costs, and change how songwriters and music publishers are paid for uses of their works.