Sony Music and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic

Major music publishing giants Sony Music and Warner Chappell have launched a significant copyright infringement lawsuit against the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.

Filed in a California federal district court, the legal action seeks substantial financial damages that could reach into the billions of dollars. The plaintiffs accuse the AI developer of utilizing tens of thousands of copyrighted songs without permission or licensing agreements. In addition to targeting the corporate entity, the lawsuit names individual co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants, representing an escalatory step in the ongoing legal battles over how generative AI models are trained on intellectual property.

The complaint details specific allegations of illicit data gathering, claiming that Anthropic personnel used file-sharing protocols like BitTorrent and shadow library platforms to download millions of pirated texts. Furthermore, the publishers assert that the startup bypassed legitimate licensing structures by scraping song lyrics directly from platforms that pay for those rights. This litigation adds to a mounting collection of legal challenges confronting Anthropic from the entertainment and publishing industries, including prior multi-million and multi-billion dollar disputes with other music labels. Anthropic has not yet publicly commented on the new allegations.