Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic Over Songs Used for Claude

Two of the largest names in music publishing have taken Anthropic to court, and the numbers involved are large enough to matter even for a company valued in the trillions. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed suit late on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing the AI firm of what they call "a brazen campaign" of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted work to train its Claude models. The complaint names Anthropic along with chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann, according to TechCrunch and Axios.

At the heart of the case is a claim that Anthropic collected tens of thousands of compositions without a license. The publishers list well-known titles among the allegedly infringed works, including "Eye of the Tiger," "Uptown Funk," "Hallelujah" and Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You." They are asking for a jury trial and for damages of up to 150,000 dollars per infringed work, plus 25,000 dollars each time the company allegedly stripped out copyright management information. With thousands of songs in play, the total could reach into the billions.

Not the first time

This is familiar ground for Anthropic. A separate group of publishers sued the company back in 2023 over Claude reproducing song lyrics, a case in which Anthropic won an early round. What is different now is the scale and the timing. The plaintiffs are two of the three major publishers, the alleged conduct goes to how the training data was obtained rather than just what the model spits out, and the suit lands at the most sensitive possible moment for the company.

Anthropic is moving toward a public listing that reports have pegged at a valuation approaching two trillion dollars, which would rank among the largest offerings ever. We have followed that process as it has taken shape. A billion-dollar copyright fight is exactly the kind of open-ended liability that investors read closely, and it fits a wider pattern the company itself has flagged. Amodei has spoken recently about a growing crisis of trust around the industry, and litigation from the creative sector is a large part of that.

What the company says

Anthropic is not backing down. "We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court," a spokesperson said. The company has argued in past cases that training on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use, a position the courts have treated inconsistently and have yet to settle at the appellate level.

The stakes reach beyond one company. If publishers can win damages tied to how training sets were assembled, every lab that scraped the open web faces the same exposure. The music industry lost the first fight over digital copying two decades ago and spent years catching up. This time it is moving early, and it is aiming at the part of the pipeline that is hardest to defend: not the output, but where the data came from.