Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over alleged copyright infringement

Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Anthropic, alleging infringement of copyrights in tens of thousands of works. The plaintiffs seek damages of up to 150 thousand dollars per work, plus up to 25 thousand dollars for each instance in which identifying copyright information was removed. If the court awards the maximum amounts, total liability could reach several billion dollars. The complaint describes the conduct as “one of the biggest and most brazen intellectual property thefts in history.”

The filing also names the company’s co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. According to the complaint, Mann used BitTorrent to download more than five million pirated books, and other employees downloaded at least two million additional books from a “Pirate Library Mirror” repository. The complaint further alleges that Anthropic scraped song lyrics from sites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind, which pay record companies for licensing content.

This is not Anthropic’s first high-profile lawsuit. The company recently settled a case brought by the publishing industry for 1.5 billion dollars. It also faces separate actions from Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, as well as individual suits from BMG and Round Hill Music.

The complaint lists specific songs that it says appear in Anthropic’s training data, including “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, “Livin’ On a Prayer” by Bon Jovi, “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire, “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, and “Paper Rings” by Taylor Swift. Anthropic has not responded to requests for comment.