Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over song lyrics

In short: Sony Music and Warner Chappell have sued Anthropic, claiming the company used copyrighted songs and lyrics without permission to build its Claude AI models.

What happened

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. They say Anthropic copied and used “tens of thousands” of copyrighted works.

The publishers are asking for up to $150,000 per work in damages. They also ask for up to $25,000 each time identifiable copyright information was removed, like stripping a name tag off a product. If a court sided with the publishers and awarded the maximum amounts, the total could reach several billion dollars.

The lawsuit also names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. The complaint claims the company obtained material through “torrenting” and “scraping” (automated downloading, like using a vacuum to collect large amounts of text from websites), and through downloads from piracy sources. It also alleges Anthropic collected lyrics from sites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind, which license lyrics from rights holders.

The filing lists examples of songs it says appeared in training data, including “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Livin’ On a Prayer,” “September,” “Hallelujah,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.” According to The Verge, Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Why it matters

These cases help decide what AI companies are allowed to use when teaching their systems, and whether they must pay creators for that material. The outcome could affect how future AI tools handle music, lyrics, and other copyrighted work.

Source: The Verge AI