Anthropic sued over alleged theft of 'tens of thousands' of songs

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Anthropic on August 28, the Guardian reports, accusing the startup behind Claude of misusing "tens of thousands" of copyrighted songs to train its AI models.

• Filed August 28 in a California court, targeting Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann
• Alleged method: "torrenting, scraping and downloading" song lyrics, then reproducing them in responses to prompts
• Damages sought: up to $150,000 per infringed work, plus $25,000 for each altered or removed attribution
• At least 20,000 works allegedly involved

The complaint names specific compositions: Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You, Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Survivor's Eye of the Tiger, Bon Jovi's Livin' on a Prayer, Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, Mark Ronson's Uptown Funk, and Katy Perry's California Gurls. The plaintiffs call it "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."

Defendants specifically elected to harvest unauthorized copies of Music Publishers' works so that they would not have to pay Music Publishers a licensing fee to use their works in AI training and development.

The publishers say Anthropic also acquired songs by scraping lyrics from licensed sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind and from archive datasets such as Common Crawl, and that it stripped identifying information from the files, denying rights holders "valuable attribution." The complaint borrows a figure from a related case: Anthropic and Mann allegedly downloaded at least 7 million pirated books, a claim first made in a lawsuit from US authors that Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion last year.

UK composer and copyright campaigner Ed Newton-Rex said he was "not surprised" that rights holders were defending themselves against a company with a "history of downloading and training their AI models on huge libraries."

Anthropic isn't only facing music publishers. Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group have filed separate claims, and this month Germany's GEMA licensing agency won a similar copyright case against AI music generator Suno over songs including Boney M's Daddy Cool. Intokened has tracked the same fight play out on the book side, where Amazon faces its own scraping accusations over rare books used to train its Nova models.

The financial stakes go beyond the lawsuit itself. Anthropic told TechCrunch it disagrees with the publishers' claims and "intend[s] to defend ourselves robustly in court." The company is preparing for a stock listing that could value it near $2 trillion, a target it has pitched to investors as part of a $30 trillion market opportunity.

The 7 million pirated books in the authors' case set the price of the last settlement at $1.5 billion. If the music publishers' math holds, and every one of the 20,000-plus songs counts as a separate infringement, this one could cost more.

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