Music giants Sony Music and Warner Chappell are demanding billions of dollars in damages from artificial intelligence company Anthropic, accusing the tech firm of carrying out "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history" to train its AI models.
In a legal action filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the music publishers allege that Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, conducted a systematic campaign of downloading and scraping copyrighted works to build and profit from its Claude AI series. Specific classic and modern hits named in the complaint include Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s "Ain’t No Mountain High Enough," Bon Jovi’s "Livin’ On a Prayer," Earth, Wind & Fire’s "September," Leonard Cohen’s "Hallelujah," and Taylor Swift’s "Paper Rings."
The lawsuit targets both the corporate entity and key executives individually. The complaint alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, while Anthropic employees downloaded at least two million more from the Pirate Library Mirror. It also claims Anthropic scraped lyrics directly from platforms like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which pay to license content from publishers.
The financial consequences for Anthropic could be unprecedented. The publishers are asking for up to $150,000 per copyrighted work, plus up to $25,000 for every instance where identifiable copyright management data was stripped. If awarded at the maximum threshold, total damages could reach several billion dollars.
This case represents the latest high-stakes conflict over generative AI and intellectual property rights. Anthropic recently settled a lawsuit brought by book publishers for $1.5 billion and continues to defend against separate copyright claims from major industry players, including Universal Music Group, Concord, BMG, and Round Hill Music.