Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a federal lawsuit against Anthropic that claimed the AI giant’s alleged theft of the companies’ intellectual property marked “a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale,” representing the latest legal salvo in the music industry‘s reckoning with the technology’s rise.
The named defendants include Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The lawsuit, filed late Friday in the U.S. Northern District of California, alleged that Anthropic used thousands of the companies’ protected work — including songs such as Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough“ and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” among others cited in the 48-page suit — to train its Claude chatbot “in blatant violation of copyright law.” The suit asked the court to force Anthropic to stop the illegal training and pay statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringing work, among other requests.
