Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic in Northern California, accusing the Claude maker of training on their lyrics without a license.
The complaint, filed Aug. 28 as Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC et al v. Anthropic PBC et al, No. 5:26-cv-09217, names Anthropic plus co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. It is Sony Music Publishing, not Sony Music Entertainment.
The publishers call it a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale.” They want statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work for tens of thousands of compositions, plus up to $25,000 each time copyright management information was stripped. Those are ceilings in the complaint, not a judgment. If a court awarded the maximum on tens of thousands of works, the demand would run into the billions.
This is not the $1.5 billion authors’ settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic. That case was about books. This one is about songs. It is also separate from earlier music suits by Universal, Concord, BMG, and others.
The complaint alleges Mann torrented at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis in 2021, and that Anthropic employees took at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror in 2022. Music Business Worldwide said those book-download numbers come from the Bartz record. The publishers also allege Anthropic scraped lyrics from MusixMatch and LyricFind, sites that license lyrics from labels.
Songs named in the filing include “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Livin’ On a Prayer,” “September,” “Hallelujah,” “Paper Rings,” “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” “Eye of the Tiger,” and “Here Comes Santa Claus.”
An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch: “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.”