The music publishing arms of Sony Music and Warner Music have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in a California federal court, alleging that the AI firm misused their copyrighted song compositions to train its Claude AI models.
Sony and Warner said in the complaint, filed Friday, that Anthropic pirated hundreds of song lyrics and sheet music from The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson and hundreds of other artists to train Claude to respond to human prompts.
The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic obtained lyrics and sheet music through piracy sources, including Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror. According to the complaint, the company also scraped licensed lyric websites such as Musixmatch and LyricFind. The publishers claim Anthropic used the material as training data for Claude.
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“In blatant violation of copyright law, Defendants have unlawfully acquired troves of Music Publishers’ musical compositions, and then systematically copied those works multiple times,” the filing states, “including as the inputs to train Anthropic’s Claude AI models and in the outputs those models generate.”
Scraping and distributing Musixmatch content violates the site’s user agreement, while LyricFind’s privacy policy similarly prohibits reproduction “unless otherwise stated,” the suit says.
Sony and Warner are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each song the court finds Anthropic willfully infringed. They are also seeking up to $25,000 for each instance in which copyright-management information was allegedly removed from a work.
With the complaint covering at least “thousands if not tens of thousands” of works, the potential damages could reach billions of dollars.
The songs named in the complaint include Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings” and “Cruel Summer.”
Anthropic rejected the allegations, saying the company will “defend ourselves robustly” in court.
“This is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune.
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The law firm Oppenheim and Zebrak, which represents Sony and Warner in the new suit, first sued Anthropic in October 2023 alongside Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO over roughly 500 songs.
The same publishers filed a second suit through the same firm in January, covering more than 20,000 works and seeking more than $3 billion. BMG and Round Hill Music have also sued Anthropic over music this year.
The lawsuit comes as AI companies face increasing scrutiny over alleged copyright violations. Earlier this year, a U.S. federal court approved a record-breaking $1.5 billion settlement in a copyright dispute brought by authors and publishers against Anthropic. The plaintiffs accused the AI company of misusing their books to train Claude.