RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Last month, Anthropic was at the center of public backlash for a plan , called “Project Panama,” to “destructively scan all the books in the world” to train its Claude AI models. Now, the AI company finds itself again facing the (copyright) music.
Sony Music and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic, naming CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants, for what the suit characterizes as illegally downloading, scraping and torrenting “thousands upon thousands” of copyrighted songs to train its AI models.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Northern California, alleges that Anthropic obtained lyrics and sheet music through pirate sources including Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror, and, according to the complaint, scraped licensed lyric websites, such as Musixmatch and LyricFind. The publishers allege the material was then incorporated into Claude’s training data and that the model can reproduce copyrighted lyrics.
“In blatant violation of copyright law, Defendants have unlawfully acquired troves of Music Publishers’ musical compositions, and then systematically copied those works multiple times,” the filing read, “including as the inputs to train Anthropic’s Claude AI models and in the outputs those models generate.”
Scraping and distributing Musixmatch content violates the site’s user agreement , and LyricFind’s privacy policy similarly prohibits reproduction “unless otherwise stated,” the suit states.
Sony and Warner are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each song the court finds Anthropic to have infringed willfully. They are also seeking as much as $25,000 for each instance in which copyright-management information was allegedly removed from a work. With the complaint covering at least “thousands if not tens of thousands” of works, the potential damages could reach into the billions of dollars.
Among the songs named in the complaint are Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings” and “Cruel Summer.”
Anthropic rejected the allegations and said the company will “defend ourselves robustly” in court.
“This is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune .
It’s true that Anthropic has some history with the law firm: Oppenheim and Zebrak , which represents Sony and Warner in the new suit, first sued Anthropic in Oct. 2023 alongside Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO over roughly 500 songs. The same publishers filed a second suit through the same firm in January, covering more than 20,000 works and seeking over $3 billion. BMG and Round Hill Music have also sued Anthropic over music this year, but with different counsel—putting the total number of music-copyright suits against the company at five.
Anthropic’s other copyright fights
Anthropic points to Bartz v. Anthropic as precedent for its fair use in using human-made work to train their models. The company says “training generative AI models is a transformative fair use—as the court held in Bartz ,” highlighting the judge’s ruling on the use of copyrighted works.
“In short, the purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative,” Judge William Alsup wrote in June 2025 regarding the case. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them.”
The AI company settled in Sept. 2025 for $1.5 billion with the owners of the copyrighted works. But Sony and Warner said it wasn’t enough.
“Anthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright theft,” the new Sony and Warner complaint read. “And $1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation,” the complaint stated, referencing Anthropic’s IPO target.
“In the process of building and operating AI models, Anthropic unlawfully copies and disseminates vast amounts of copyrighted works—including the lyrics to myriad musical compositions owned or controlled by Publishers,” the lawsuit filing read.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell did not immediately respond to Fortune ‘s requests for comment.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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