Two major music publishers, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic on 28 August, claiming the company engaged in widespread copyright infringement. The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic obtained and used “tens of thousands” of copyrighted musical compositions to train its Claude AI models without authorization or licensing fees.
According to the lawsuit filed in California, the infringing works include well-known songs such as Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger. The publishers claim Anthropic acquired these compositions through multiple methods, including torrenting, scraping, and downloading from both pirate websites and legal platforms like Musixmatch and LyricFind. The suit also references the use of datasets from archive sites such as Common Crawl. Additionally, the plaintiffs allege that Anthropic stripped identifying information from songs during processing, depriving copyright owners of proper attribution.
The damages sought could total billions of dollars, calculated at up to $150,000 per infringed composition and $25,000 for each instance of removed or altered identifying data. The lawsuit targets Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The publishers characterize the alleged conduct as “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”
This case follows a recent settlement between Anthropic and U.S. authors for $1.5 billion over similar copyright allegations. The company also faces separate claims from Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group. In response, Anthropic stated it disagrees with the allegations and intends to mount a robust defense in court. The company is preparing for a potential stock market listing that could value it at $2 trillion.
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