Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell just filed a lawsuit against Anthropic.
The two music publishing companies say the AI company used thousands of copyrighted songs without permission. And they want to be paid for it.
The lawsuit, filed in a California court on August 28, could cost Anthropic billions of dollars.
That’s big for a company gearing up for a stock market debut that could value it at $2 trillion.
Accusations
Sony and Warner Chappell manage copyrights for songwriters and composers. They say Anthropic grabbed the lyrics to tens of thousands of songs without asking or paying.
The list of songs involved reads like a greatest hits album. Mariah Carey’s holiday classic “All I Want for Christmas Is You” made the cut.
So did “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” the Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell duet, and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” is on there too.
Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” and Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” are both named as songs that got swept up in Anthropic’s data collection.
The publishers describe the alleged actions as one of the biggest and most obvious cases of intellectual property theft in history.
Data Collection
The lawsuit lays out specific methods Anthropic supposedly used to collect them.
According to the complaint, Anthropic torrented, scraped, and downloaded lyrics from copyrighted works.
The publishers argue that Anthropic was training the company’s Claude AI models. They also claim Claude reproduced those lyrics directly when users asked for them.
The suit claims Anthropic and co-founder Benjamin Mann downloaded at least 7 million pirated book copies.
That included lyrics and sheet music for songs like Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
Where did that 7 million figure come from? It traces back to an earlier lawsuit. A group of US authors sued Anthropic over similar claims.
That case ended with Anthropic agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to settle. The new lawsuit also names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei directly, along with Mann.
Scraping
The publishers say Anthropic also pulled lyrics from legitimate lyric websites. Sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind got named in the complaint.
So did massive web archives like Common Crawl. The lawsuit claims Anthropic stripped out identifying information as it processed these songs.
That’s a significant detail because it robbed copyright holders of proper credit for their work, according to the publishers. But why would a company skip paying for licenses?
The plaintiffs say that Anthropic specifically chose to harvest unauthorized copies so it wouldn’t have to pay licensing fees for AI training and development.
Settlement
Publishers are seeking up to $150,000 for every single infringed work. On top of that, they want $25,000 for each instance where identifying data was removed or changed.
The lawsuit suggests at least 20,000 works are involved. That puts potential damages well into the billions.
Copyright Lawsuit
Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group have both brought copyright claims against the company in the past.
And it’s not just Anthropic facing this kind of heat. Earlier this month, AI music generator Suno lost a similar copyright case.
German licensing agency GEMA sued Suno over songs including Boney M’s “Daddy Cool.” Suno lost that fight.
Ed Newton-Rex, a UK-based composer, who campaigns for artist copyright protections. He said he wasn’t shocked by the new lawsuit at all.
According to him, Anthropic has a track record of downloading huge content libraries to train its AI systems.
Anthropic
A company spokesperson responded to the claims, saying the company disagrees with the publishers and plans to fight the case in court.
That fight could take a while to play out. But the outcome might shape how AI companies handle copyrighted music going forward.
For now, the case adds another layer of legal pressure on Anthropic. The company is already dealing with a $1.5 billion settlement from its earlier authors’ lawsuit. This new fight with the music industry could end up costing even more.
