Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic, Charging 'Blatant' Music Theft

Sony and Warner have jointly sued Anthropic, accusing the AI company of training its Claude models on "tens of thousands" of their copyrighted songs without permission—which the suit calls "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." The complaint, filed Friday in federal court in Northern California, names Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann, Axios reports, and describes what the music publishers call a sweeping operation of torrenting and scraping protected works.

The suit seeks hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for each allegedly infringed song, a potentially massive sum given that each track can carry multiple copyrights. It argues that Claude reproduces stolen lyrics verbatim in outputs and that protections added after past suits can be circumvented by giving the model new prompts, per Music Business Worldwide, which posted the lawsuit here. Anthropic, which previously paid $1.5 billion to settle a copyright case with authors and publishers, disputed the music publishers' claims and said it will fight them in court.