Legal Action Filed in California
Music industry giants Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic, alleging the company engaged in the systematic theft of copyrighted musical compositions to train its Claude artificial intelligence models. The lawsuit, filed in a California federal court on August 28, accuses the firm and its leadership—including CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann—of infringing on the rights of songwriters and composers on a massive scale.
The plaintiffs represent a vast catalog of iconic songs, ranging from Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” According to the legal filing, Anthropic allegedly utilized illegal methods, including “torrenting, scraping, and downloading” lyrics and sheet music, to fuel its AI development. The publishers describe this as “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”
This report draws on information published by The Guardian.
Scope of the Allegations
The lawsuit claims that Anthropic’s infringement extends to at least 20,000 specific works. The publishers allege that the AI company bypassed legitimate licensing fees by harvesting unauthorized copies of songs from pirate websites, as well as scraping data from both legal sites like Musixmatch and public archive repositories such as Common Crawl. Furthermore, the suit alleges that Anthropic intentionally stripped identifying metadata from these files, which prevented creators from receiving proper attribution and hindered the tracking of usage.
This is not the first time Anthropic has faced allegations regarding its data acquisition practices. The current suit references a previous $1.5 billion settlement reached with US authors, where the company was accused of downloading approximately 7 million books from pirate sites to train its systems. The music publishers are now seeking damages that could reach billions, citing statutory penalties of up to $150,000 per infringed work and $25,000 for each instance of metadata removal.
Anthropic’s Position
Anthropic, which is currently preparing for a potential stock market listing with a valuation estimated at $2 trillion, has denied the allegations. A company spokesperson stated, “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.” The company maintains that its development of Claude is conducted within the bounds of AI safety and research protocols. Despite this, the legal pressure on AI firms is intensifying, with similar cases involving other entities, such as the recent loss by AI music generator Suno in a case against the German licensing agency GEMA.