Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over song lyrics

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, together with dozens of affiliated entities, sued Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging Claude was trained on lyrics and sheet music obtained through torrenting and scraping rather than licensing. The complaint names Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants alongside the company, and cites works by artists including the Beatles, Taylor Swift and Mariah Carey — in one example, the suit describes Claude reproducing the lyrics to “I Am the Walrus” on request.

The plaintiffs allege Anthropic acquired millions of pirated books from sites including Library Genesis and pulled lyrics from licensed sites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind and from datasets including Common Crawl, then failed to prevent Claude from reproducing the copyrighted material verbatim despite guardrails added after earlier litigation. They seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work for wilful infringement across what the complaint describes as tens of thousands of compositions, putting potential exposure in the billions of dollars, plus damages for removal of copyright management information.

The complaint explicitly invokes Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with book authors and publishers over the same torrenting conduct, arguing the company “considers that to be just the cost of doing business.” It is a separate action from the Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO suit filed against Anthropic in 2023 over similar allegations, which remained unresolved, giving Anthropic two concurrent lyrics-copyright cases from different sets of music-industry plaintiffs.