Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music and affiliated publishers have sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic in federal court in Northern California, accusing it of unlawfully obtaining and copying copyrighted musical works to develop its Claude models. The complaint also names Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants. Anthropic disputes the allegations and says it will defend itself robustly.
The court docket shows that the publishers filed the copyright case on August 28 and requested a jury trial. They allege that Anthropic trained its systems using tens of thousands of their compositions, making the action broader than several earlier music cases. The filing identifies well-known works from multiple catalogs, but the allegations have not yet been tested in court and no finding of liability has been made.
According to the complaint, Anthropic obtained material through large-scale torrent downloads, web scraping and the scanning of purchased print books. The publishers allege that collections downloaded from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror included books containing lyrics and sheet music. They also claim Claude can reproduce protected lyrics in its responses and that safeguards introduced by the company can be bypassed through repeated prompting.
The lawsuit advances four claims, including direct copyright infringement linked to torrenting, contributory infringement against Amodei and Mann, direct infringement by Anthropic, and removal or alteration of copyright-management information. The publishers seek up to $150,000 for each work they say was willfully infringed and up to $25,000 for each alleged copyright-information violation, alongside destruction of infringing copies and an account of Claude training data. Those amounts are statutory demands, not damages awarded by a court.
Anthropic told TechCrunch and Axios that it disagrees with the publishers' claims and intends to defend itself in court. The dispute arrives as developers and rights holders test how existing copyright rules apply to the acquisition of training material and to outputs from generative AI systems. Music rights are especially complex because lyrics, compositions and sound recordings can have different owners and separate registrations.
The new case follows other litigation against Anthropic by music publishers, including actions involving Universal, Concord, BMG and Round Hill. It also follows a $1.5 billion settlement with authors over pirated books; in that matter, a judge distinguished between potentially lawful model training and unlawful acquisition of source material. The Sony and Warner publishers now want a jury to apply copyright law to their catalogs, while the timing of Anthropic's response and the court's next procedural steps remain pending.
Comments