Sony Music and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over Copyrighted Works

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking damages over tens of thousands of copyrighted works. According to ChainCatcher, the complaint alleges Anthropic illegally downloaded, scraped, and distributed copyrighted material on a large scale to develop and train its Claude AI models. The plaintiffs are seeking up to $150,000 per work and an additional $25,000 for each act of removing identifiable copyright data. The lawsuit also names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. The complaint alleges Mann used BitTorrent to download more than 5 million pirated books, while employees downloaded at least 2 million books from Pirate Library Mirror. It also says Anthropic scraped lyrics from websites including MusixMatch and LyricFind. Anthropic recently reached a $1.5 billion settlement in another lawsuit with publishers and is also facing separate lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music.