Two of the world’s largest music publishers have dragged Anthropic and its co-founders into federal court over the song lyrics in Claude’s training data. The suit, filed Friday in the Northern District of California, alleges a coordinated push to pirate copyrighted work at scale.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell say the lab torrented and scraped millions of books, some packed with lyrics and sheet music, and are seeking up to $150K per song. They describe the haul as one of the biggest ongoing thefts of intellectual property in industry history.
The complaint names Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally. Anthropic called the claims wrong and promised a robust defense.
The publishers’ lawyers are repeat players in this arena: the same team won a $1.5B verdict in Bartz v. Anthropic and represents Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group in a case filed in January. This time the accusation is piracy by torrent rather than simple scraping, which they argue makes the theft more flagrant.
The outcome will echo well beyond the two labels. The case puts AI companies on notice over how they assemble training corpora, a question now shadowing every major model lab and the startups building on them.
