Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a federal lawsuit against Anthropic that claimed the AI giant’s alleged theft of the companies’ intellectual property marked “a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and down copyrighted works on a massive scale,” representing the latest legal salvo in the music industry‘s reckoning with the technology’s rise.
The named defendants include Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The lawsuit, filed late Friday in the U.S. Northern District of California, alleged that Anthropic used thousands of the companies’ protected work — including songs such as Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough“ and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” among others cited in the 48-page suit — to train its Claude chatbot “in blatant violation of copyright law.” The suit asked the court to force Anthropic to stop the illegal training and pay statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringing work, among other requests.
“These acts separately and together inflict immense harm on Music Publishers and the songwriters they proudly represent,” the attorneys wrote on behalf of the publishing arms. “Defendants can no longer hide their extraordinary theft, and their mass infringement is now well-documented.”
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The plaintiffs are the respective publishing arms of Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group. A WMG spokesperson had no additional comment, while a Sony Music spokesperson did not respond to an immediate request for comment. An Anthropic spokesperson said the case was merely “recycling allegations from cases already before the courts.”
“Training generative AI models is a transformative fair use — as the court held in Bartz — and we will defend ourselves robustly,” said the spokesperson, referencing the company’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors in the copyright infringement case Bartz v. Anthropic The judge in that case ruled that, while Anthropic could train its models on copyrighted content, it couldn’t obtain that content through piracy. The lawyers in Sony and Warner’s case also worked on the authors’ case.
Music companies have oscillated between lawsuits and licensing as they’ve navigated the rise of generative AI companies, often pursuing litigation before striking deals. The lawsuit follows lawsuits brought by a group of music publishers including Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, a March lawsuit by BMG and, just last month, Round Hill Music against Anthropic over similar allegations of illegal scraping. Those ran parallel to lawsuits against the AI music generators Suno and Udio; WMG has settled its cases against the two generators, while Universal has struck a deal with Udio while it pursues its case against Suno. Sony Music remains in active litigation against both.