Last year, Anthropic made history as the first AI enterprise to settle such litigation, agreeing to a $1.5 billion payout to end a class action brought by authors
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Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is facing a lawsuit in California federal court from the music publishing arms of Sony Music and Warner Music, which accuse the firm of unlawfully using copyrighted song compositions to train its Claude models.
According to the legal action submitted on Friday, Anthropic engaged in the unauthorized use of sheet music and lyrics from hundreds of musicians, including Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift, and The Beatles, enabling Claude to generate responses to user queries.
This action marks the newest battle in a broader series of legal challenges launched by creators, media outlets, book publishers, and record labels against technology developers over AI training data.
Universal Music Group previously filed lawsuits against Anthropic in 2023 and again earlier this year over similar copyright allegations, with those proceedings remaining active.
Last year, Anthropic made history as the first AI enterprise to settle such litigation, agreeing to a $1.5 billion payout to end a class action brought by authors.
"Anthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright theft," Sony and Warner asserted in the filing.
"And $1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering 2-trillion-dollar valuation."
Rebutting the claims on Monday, an Anthropic spokesperson characterized the suit as "this is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts."
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The representative stated the firm plans to defend its position "robustly," maintaining that using protected content for AI training constitutes fair use under legal standards established by the judge in the authors' lawsuit.
Representatives and legal counsel for Warner Music and Sony Music did not immediately return requests for comment on Monday.
The filing contends that Anthropic acquired the copyrighted sheet music and lyrics through illicit torrent downloads for model training, noting that Claude can output protected lyrics "verbatim" in response to prompts.
Furthermore, the plaintiffs allege that Anthropic instructed Claude on their catalogs so it could "generate vast quantities of purportedly 'new' AI-generated song lyrics, which compete with Music Publishers’ legitimate copyrighted works as harmful market substitutes."
The music publishing companies are requesting statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each copyright violation, along with a court order blocking Anthropic from using their compositions.
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