Sony Music and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic, accusing the AI company of pirating songs to train Claude.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, names Anthropic along with CEO Dario Amodei and cofounder Benjamin Mann. Sony and Warner accuse Anthropic of running a campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted songs to train its Claude models, then profiting from the results. The companies point to specific titles they say were lifted, including "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "All I Want for Christmas Is You," "Eye of the Tiger," and "Here Comes Santa Claus." They're seeking $150,000 in statutory damages per work plus $25,000 per violation, a formula that could add up to billions across the thousands of songs named.
Sony and Warner are the second and third biggest music companies on the planet, so this isn't a scrappy indie label testing a theory. It also lands right after Anthropic paid $1.5 billion to settle a nearly identical case with book publishers, which gives the music industry a real number to point to in settlement talks.
Universal Music Group already has two suits of its own against Anthropic, including one seeking more than $3 billion, so add this to a stack of AI copyright fights that's starting to look less like risk and more like a standing cost of doing business.