CALIFORNIA : Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Anthropic, accusing the Claude developer of unlawfully using tens of thousands of copyrighted musical works to train its AI systems.
The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, also names Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants. The publishers allege the company engaged in large-scale torrenting, scraping and downloading of copyrighted material without permission or payment.
According to the complaint, at least 20,000 copyrighted works are involved, potentially exposing Anthropic to billions of dollars in damages.
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The publishers claim Anthropic obtained protected lyrics and musical compositions from unauthorised sources and then used them to train its flagship Claude AI models.
They further allege that Claude is capable of reproducing exact or near-exact lyrics from copyrighted songs when prompted, potentially competing with licensed lyric services and depriving songwriters and copyright owners of royalties.
Among the compositions cited in reports on the lawsuit are Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” famously performed by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.”
The plaintiffs described the alleged conduct as “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”
They are seeking a jury trial and maximum statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each copyrighted work found to have been infringed. With tens of thousands of compositions potentially covered by the case, the total damages sought could run into several billion dollars.
The lawsuit comes as the music and publishing industries intensify their legal battle with AI companies over the material used to train generative AI models.
Anthropic has disputed the publishers’ allegations.
“We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court,” an Anthropic spokesperson said in response to the lawsuit.
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