Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over Claude's training data
The publishers accuse Anthropic of torrenting and scraping tens of thousands of songs to train Claude, in a suit separate from the existing publisher litigation the company already faces.
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- Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a federal copyright lawsuit against Anthropic on August 28, naming co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants, according to TechCrunch and Engadget.
- The complaint alleges Anthropic obtained "tens of thousands" of the publishers' song compositions through piracy sites and torrenting rather than licensing them, and seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work willfully infringed.
- Anthropic told TechCrunch it disagrees with the claims and "intend[s] to defend ourselves robustly in court."
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic on August 28, according to reports from TechCrunch and Engadget, alleging the company trained its Claude models on tens of thousands of the publishers' copyrighted song compositions obtained through piracy sites and torrenting rather than licensing agreements. The suit names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally as defendants, according to both outlets.
The complaint describes what the publishers call "a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale," per TechCrunch's account, and seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work found to be willfully infringed, plus $25,000 for each instance in which copyright-management information was allegedly stripped from a work.
Anthropic disputed the claims. "We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court," the company told TechCrunch. The suit lands in the same California federal court already handling a separate copyright case against Anthropic brought by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, and follows Anthropic's roughly $1.5 billion settlement with a class of book authors over similar training-data claims earlier this year.
A second major music-rights holder suing the same company over the same underlying practice — rather than settling alongside the first — suggests publishers see litigation, not negotiation, as the more effective lever against AI labs that trained on unlicensed work before licensing markets existed. Any AI company still relying on scraped or torrented training data is now watching whether courts treat statutory per-work damages as a survivable cost of doing business or an existential one.
Does Anthropic's answer or an early motion to dismiss narrow the copyright claims in this suit before it reaches discovery?
Still open. When the paper finds out, it will say so here and on the open questions page — including if it got this wrong.