Sony and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over Claude Music Training Allegations

Sony Music and Warner Chappell filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in a Northern California district court. The companies allege Anthropic illegally torrented, scraped, and downloaded copyrighted works to develop and operate its Claude AI models. Anthropic cofounders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann were also named in the filing.

The complaint says Anthropic collected “thousands upon thousands” of copyrighted songs. Examples named in the report include “Eye of the Tiger,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “All I Want for Christmas is You,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.”

The lawsuit alleges Anthropic accessed copyrighted material through methods including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The publishers also cite a June 2025 ruling that Anthropic downloaded over 7 million pirated books to train Claude.

According to the complaint, some books from those sources contained lyrics and sheet music tied to copyrighted musical compositions. The lawsuit names works including “Livin’ On a Prayer,” “September,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “Ramblin’ Man,” and “Hallelujah.”

Sony Music and Warner Chappell requested a jury trial and are seeking statutory damages. The companies want up to $150,000 for each composition they allege was used to train Claude.

The publishers argue Claude can generate identical or near-identical copies of copyrighted works in user responses. They also allege training on copyrighted lyrics could enable AI-generated lyrics that compete with human-made songs.

The lawsuit lands amid a broader wave of copyright challenges facing AI companies. Business Insider reports that large language models such as Claude and ChatGPT rely on large volumes of training data, and that tech companies have faced scrutiny over how that data is acquired.

The article notes Anthropic previously agreed to pay over $1.5 billion to authors to settle a class-action lawsuit related to pirated works. OpenAI has also faced copyright lawsuits, including from The New York Times and Encyclopedia Britannica.