Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a federal lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the AI company behind Claude of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted songs to train its models. The suit was filed late Friday in a Northern California federal court and names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants alongside the company.
The publishers allege Anthropic ran a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale." The complaint lists more than 20,000 songs, including Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You," Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings," Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer," Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," and Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."
The filing says Anthropic obtained some material through pirate digital archives Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. It also alleges co-founder Benjamin Mann obtained over five million pirated books using BitTorrent, while employees downloaded roughly two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. Some of those books contained song lyrics and sheet music, and Anthropic is also accused of taking lyrics from MusixMatch and LyricFind, services that pay labels for licensed content.
Sony and Warner Chappell are seeking a jury trial and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed song, plus $25,000 for each time copyright information was copied from a work. Given the alleged catalog of more than 20,000 songs, the potential damages could run into billions of dollars.
Anthropic rejected the claims, saying, "We disagree with the publishers' claims, and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court." The company called the case "the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts," and said model training is "a transformative fair use." The lawsuit follows a June 2025 court finding that Anthropic downloaded more than 7 million pirated books, a ruling that led to a $1.5 billion settlement with authors. Anthropic also previously faced copyright claims from Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO over lyric reproduction.
