Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic and its founders over lyrics

Music publishers sue Anthropic and its founders

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, together with a group of other major music publishers, have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. According to TechCrunch, the complaint was filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and was first reported by Music Business Worldwide. The publishers allege that Anthropic ran a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works" to develop and profit from its Claude AI models.

What the publishers are demanding

The Verge reports that the suit covers "tens of thousands" of copyrighted works and seeks up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for every instance in which identifying copyright information was stripped from a file. If a court found for the publishers and awarded the maximum on every count, the total would reach several billion dollars. In the complaint, the publishers describe the alleged conduct as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."

The filing singles out specific songs said to appear in Anthropic's training data, including "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, Bon Jovi's "Livin' On a Prayer," Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings."

Allegations against the co-founders

Beyond targeting the company itself, the complaint names Amodei and Mann as individual defendants. According to The Verge, it alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download more than five million pirated books, and that Anthropic employees downloaded at least two million more from a site called Pirate Library Mirror. The suit also claims Anthropic scraped lyrics from services such as MusixMatch and LyricFind, which had themselves paid the labels to license that content.

TechCrunch notes that this case is broader than the earlier actions and accuses Anthropic of "flagrant piracy" through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of books, including volumes that contain lyrics and sheet music. Neither outlet received a comment from Anthropic before publication.

Part of a longer legal fight

This is the latest in a string of copyright claims against the AI lab. The Verge reports that Anthropic recently settled a suit brought by the publishing industry for $1.5 billion, and that it has separately faced lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG and Round Hill Music. TechCrunch describes the $1.5 billion outcome differently, reporting that Anthropic was ordered to pay that amount in the landmark Bartz v. Anthropic case after a judge ruled that using copyrighted works to train models was legal, but acquiring them through piracy was not. TechCrunch also reports that several of the lawyers behind the new complaint represented Concord and Universal Music Group in a case filed in January, and led the earlier Bartz action.

Why it matters

The Bartz precedent, as TechCrunch recounts it, draws a line between what AI companies do with copyrighted material and how they obtain it, and this new lawsuit is built squarely on that distinction. By naming Amodei and Mann individually, the publishers are also testing whether executives can be held personally responsible for how their companies assemble training data. With potential damages in the billions and a queue of music industry plaintiffs already lined up, the case adds pressure on AI labs to secure licenses for lyrics, books and other creative works rather than scrape or torrent them. For Anthropic, which markets Claude as an enterprise product, the accumulating legal exposure could shape both its data practices and its balance sheet.