The publishing arms of Sony Music and Warner Music have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the artificial intelligence company of pirating hundreds of copyrighted song lyrics and sheet music to train its Claude models.
The complaint, lodged on Friday in a US federal court in California, claims Anthropic illegally obtained material from artists including The Beatles, Taylor Swift and Michael Jackson through torrent downloads. It alleges the AI system can reproduce the lyrics “verbatim” when prompted and has been used to generate competing song lyrics.
Sony and Warner described the alleged conduct as mass copyright infringement that helped drive Anthropic’s valuation to $2 trillion. “Anthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright theft,” the companies said in the filing. “And $1.5bn is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct.”
The figure refers to Anthropic’s settlement last year of a class-action lawsuit brought by authors. The music publishers are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work and a court order preventing further use of their material.
An Anthropic spokesperson rejected the claims on Monday, saying: “This is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts.” The company said it would defend itself “robustly” and maintained that AI training constitutes fair use of copyrighted material.
The case is the latest in a series of legal challenges by copyright holders, including authors, publishers and other music companies, against technology firms over the use of protected works to develop generative AI systems. Universal Music Group has also pursued separate ongoing lawsuits against Anthropic over similar allegations.
