Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging copyright infringement

Big music companies Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a potentially massive lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the AI company of massive copyright infringement. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has been served with the lawsuit, which claims Anthropic as the primary perpetrator of one of the largest ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.

Alongside Anthropic CEO and cofounder Dario Amodei and cofounder Benjamin Mann, the lawsuit names the company in the legal action.

The music publishers claim that Anthropic has been engaged in a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale" to train its popular Claude AI models. Sony and Warner allege that Anthropic has reaped enormous profits from the stolen music, which they seek damages for. The music conglomerates are demanding $150,000 in damages per work and $25,000 per copyright violation, with the total potential compensation reaching billions of dollars due to the alleged theft of thousands of song titles.

Anthropic has faced intellectual property lawsuits before, including a $1.5 billion settlement with book publishers in a similar case where the AI company was accused of using stolen works to train its models. Sony and Warner's current lawsuit directly references this earlier settlement. Universal Music Group (UMG), the world's largest music company, has also previously filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Anthropic, seeking over $3 billion in damages.