Sony and Warner Take Legal Action Against Anthropic for Alleged Copyright Infringement
The major music publishing firms allege widespread copyright violations.
Two prominent music publishing entities have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, describing the situation as “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing infringements of intellectual property in history.” The suit, lodged by Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, alleges that Anthropic has engaged in a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a vast scale” to train its Claude AI models.
The publishers are requesting a jury trial and are seeking damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work and $25,000 for every instance where Anthropic allegedly removed copyright management information. The total damages could reach billions, given that the complaint states “thousands upon thousands of music publishers’ copyrighted musical compositions” were unlawfully utilized to train Claude’s models. Inquiry for comment from Anthropic regarding the lawsuit is pending.
Earlier this year, two other well-known music publishing firms filed a separate lawsuit against Anthropic, claiming illegal downloads of over 20,000 copyrighted songs for AI training. Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group sought damages exceeding $3 billion. Anthropic has also faced another copyright infringement case from a group of authors who alleged that their protected works were used without permission to train AI models, culminating in a record-setting settlement of $1.5 billion for that case.
