Sony and Warner sue Anthropic over Claude training on copyrighted lyrics
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and others sued Anthropic on Aug 30 alleging unauthorized use of tens of thousands of copyrighted lyrics to train Claude, seeking up to $150K per work.
On August 30, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, along with several other publishers, filed a 48-page lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei of unauthorized scraping of tens of thousands of copyrighted lyrics to train Claude, seeking up to $150,000 per work with total damages potentially in the billions.
The complaint alleges that Anthropic, knowing that lyrics are copyrighted, systematically scraped and used them to train the Claude model family, enabling the model to generate lyrics "substantially similar" to plaintiffs' works on demand. This is Anthropic's second judicial challenge over training-data sources, following a prior $1.5 billion settlement over pirated books used in training.
The publishers argue that Anthropic's business model is built on "ongoing massive theft" of creators' works, asking the court to order destruction of infringing model weights and award statutory and enhanced damages per work. The case will proceed to judicial review.