Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed a lawsuit on 28 August in a California federal court accusing Anthropic and executives Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann of using "tens of thousands" of copyrighted musical compositions to train the Claude family of AI models. The complaint names songs including Mariah Carey’s "All I Want for Christmas Is You," Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s "Ain’t No Mountain High Enough," Survivor’s "Eye of the Tiger," Bon Jovi’s "Livin’ on a Prayer," Leonard Cohen’s "Hallelujah," Mark Ronson’s "Uptown Funk," and Katy Perry’s "California Gurls." Plaintiffs allege Anthropic obtained works by "torrenting, scraping and downloading" lyrics and sheet music from pirate sites and by scraping legal lyric sites and archive datasets, and that Anthropic stripped identifying information that would have attributed works to rights holders. The suit cites figures from a prior authors’ case against Anthropic that the company settled for $1.5 billion and seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work plus $25,000 for each alleged removal or alteration of identifying data, putting potential liability in the multibillion-dollar range. The publishers call the conduct "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history," and UK composer Ed Newton-Rex is quoted as saying he is not surprised rights holders are defending themselves. The complaint follows other claims against Anthropic from Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group and comes amid recent legal losses for an AI music generator in Germany, which the publishers cite as related industry precedent.
