Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have sued Anthropic over the alleged unauthorized use of copyrighted music in training Claude models, seeking up to $150,000 per work.
Two major music publishers, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, have sued Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. Besides the company, the suit also names two of its founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, personally.
According to the complaint, to train the Claude models Anthropic collected tens of thousands of copyrighted musical works — the plaintiffs allege — through torrent networks and mass downloads from sources such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, and also extracted lyrics from sites such as Musixmatch and LyricFind. The suit is broader in scope than earlier similar claims.
The plaintiffs seek a jury trial and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work. This new case is separate from the earlier suit by Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO, which had previously led Anthropic to maintain guardrails against unauthorized reproduction of lyrics in Claude's output.
The case is a reminder of something important for any business building a product or service on a large language model: the provenance of a model's training data is no longer just an ethical or academic debate; it can directly affect price stability, usage policies and even the long-term availability of that model. For consultants and technical teams, reviewing each model provider's terms of use and indemnification commitments before building a commercial product on it is a prudent step.
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