Sony and Warner just sued Anthropic over copyrighted music used to train Claude, seeking $150,000 per track

Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed lawsuits against Anthropic, alleging the chatbot company stole and used tens of thousands of copyrighted songs to train its AI Claude. The publishers claim the chatbot reproduces near-identical or identical lyrics from protected songs, competing with human-written compositions. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Northern California, seeks a $150,000 statutory damage per track for every allegedly pirated composition.

Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann are named defendants. The publishers allege Claude obtained lyrics and sheet music from pirate archives like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Specific songs named in the filing include Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," Marvin Gaye's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You," Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings," and Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer."

While Anthropic has not commented publicly, music publishers are seeking a jury trial. This is not the first time a publisher has sued an AI company; Anthropic recently settled a separate class-action lawsuit tied to pirated books for $1.5 billion, the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history at the time.