Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over Thousands of Song Lyrics

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a lawsuit against Anthropic on Friday, accusing the company of systematically pirating song lyrics to train its Claude model. The suit also names Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants.

What the publishers allege

According to the complaint, Anthropic ran "a brazen campaign of illegal torrenting, scraping and downloading of copyrighted works on a massive scale" to build successive versions of Claude. The publishers claim the company obtained song lyrics from pirate lyric libraries, took part in redistributing them further over BitTorrent networks, scraped content from licensed lyrics sites, and digitized physical songbooks.

The lawsuit goes further than data acquisition alone. The publishers accuse Anthropic of deliberately stripping copyright management information from the material it obtained, and of training Claude in a way that encouraged it to memorize song lyrics word for word. As a result, they say, the model would go on to reproduce verbatim, near-verbatim or derivative versions of copyrighted songs for users.

One of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history - from the Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music complaint

The scale of the claims

Statutory damages under U.S. copyright law can reach $150,000 for each work infringed knowingly. With tens of thousands of compositions covered by the suit, the total claim could run into the billions of dollars, echoing the earlier settlement with book authors. On top of that sits a separate category of damages for stripping copyright notices, valued at up to $25,000 per instance.

The publishers are demanding a jury trial, which in billion-dollar damages cases typically raises pressure on a defendant to consider a settlement rather than risk a verdict. Anthropic already chose that path once, in the book-authors case.

Earlier cases as groundwork

The Sony and Warner Chappell suit leans in part on findings from Bartz v. Anthropic, in which a court ruled that using copyrighted material to train a model could itself be lawful, but the way it was obtained, pirating millions of books, was not. That distinction gives music publishers a ready-made legal framework for their own case.

Anthropic is now facing parallel lawsuits from several major music industry players. Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group previously filed their own suit, seeking more than $3 billion over more than 20,000 songs, while BMG and Round Hill Music have joined with separate cases in recent months. The company is fighting on several fronts at once, adding financial pressure regardless of how any single case is resolved.

What it means for the AI industry

The case touches on a fundamental question that has hung over the entire language-model industry for months: whether training on copyrighted content counts as fair use if the underlying data was obtained illegally. The book-authors ruling showed that U.S. courts are willing to separate those two questions, putting AI companies in a difficult position even when they argue that training itself falls within fair use.

For Polish musicians and music publishers, the case matters indirectly but concretely. Precedents set in U.S. courts in disputes with Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI labs shape the global standards for licensing content used to train models, standards that lawyers and regulators in Europe later invoke as well.

Anthropic has not yet publicly detailed its defense strategy in this specific case, saying only that it disagrees with the publishers' allegations. Further developments, including the first procedural motions, are expected in the coming weeks before the court in San Francisco.