Sony and Warner are suing Anthropic, alleging the AI company trained its models on tens of thousands of their copyrighted works without permission.
The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of infringing on tens of thousands of copyrighted works. It seeks $150,000 per infringed work, the maximum statutory penalty for willful infringement under US copyright law. Multiplied across the scale of the claim, damages could exceed a billion dollars if the publishers win their case.
Sony and Warner are large, well-resourced plaintiffs, and this suit adds them to a swelling docket of copyright claims against AI companies training on copyrighted material. A billion-dollar damages figure is also a signal: statutory maximums like this are designed less to reflect actual harm than to make settling look cheaper than fighting in court.
For an industry still arguing that training on copyrighted work counts as fair use, a price tag this size is a hard case to make sound reasonable.