Music publishers file federal lawsuit against Anthropic over training data

Music publishers sue Anthropic over lyrics and sheet music in federal court

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed suit against Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Friday, alleging the company conducted a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works" to train its Claude AI models.

The complaint, first reported by Music Business Worldwide, accuses Anthropic of "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." Publishers allege the company obtained millions of copies of books containing lyrics and sheet music through illegal torrenting, a method the filing describes as "flagrant piracy."

The case is distinct from prior litigation. A January complaint led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group remains active. The Bartz v. Anthropic case, argued by some of the same counsel, resulted in a $1.5 billion judgment after a court held that while using copyrighted material for AI training was permissible, acquiring that material through piracy was not. This new filing builds on that precedent directly, extending the piracy theory to music publishing.