Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have sued Anthropic, alleging that the AI company used tens of thousands of copyrighted compositions without permission. Filed in federal court in Northern California, the complaint seeks damages that could reach several billion dollars if the publishers prevail and receive the statutory maximums.
The plaintiffs are asking for up to $150,000 for each infringed work and as much as $25,000 for each instance in which identifiable copyright information was allegedly removed. The lawsuit names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants as well as the company.
The complaint alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to obtain more than five million pirated books, that employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror, and that Anthropic scraped lyrics from licensed services including MusixMatch and LyricFind. These are allegations, not court findings, and Anthropic’s liability and any damages remain to be decided.
The case adds to a wider fight over the material used to train generative AI. Anthropic recently agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with book publishers and has faced separate music-related suits from Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG and Round Hill Music.