The music publishers accuse the Claude maker of pirating tens of thousands of songs, from ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ to ‘Eye of the Tiger,’ and they’ve named CEO Dario Amodei personally.
Anthropic is staring down another copyright fight over how it trained Claude, and this one comes with a soundtrack. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, joined by dozens of other publishers, accuse the company of using tens of thousands of copyrighted songs without permission.
The suit, filed August 28 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by 35 publishing entities in all, alleges Anthropic gathered lyrics and sheet music through torrenting, scraping and downloads from pirate archives alongside licensed lyric services. Notably, it names not just the company but CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. The song list reads like a karaoke night: Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.”
Beyond the inputs, the publishers claim Claude spat protected lyrics back out verbatim or close to it in some responses, and that copyright management information was stripped from certain works. Their filing doesn’t hedge, calling the alleged conduct one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.
The heart of the case isn’t only what Anthropic used, but how it allegedly got it. That distinction has teeth thanks to Anthropic’s earlier fight over pirated books, where a court found that training an AI model on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use in some circumstances, while acquiring that material through piracy is a separate matter entirely. Anthropic paid $1.5 billion to settle that authors’ case last year.
Sony and Warner are leaning hard on that split. They allege Anthropic pulled millions of files from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror and scraped lyrics from services including Musixmatch and LyricFind, arguing that a later fair-use claim can’t wash away how the source material was obtained in the first place. They also contend Claude was taught to generate “new” AI lyrics that compete with the real thing as market substitutes.
Anthropic isn’t conceding. The company disputes the allegations, has called the suit “recycled,” and told reporters it intends to defend itself robustly in court, maintaining its training falls under fair use when the underlying material is legally acquired.
The money involved is not trivial. Statutory damages can hit $150,000 for each work found to be willfully infringed, plus up to $25,000 for each alleged removal of copyright information, which pushes Anthropic’s theoretical exposure into the billions. And this is far from a lone complaint. It joins a pile of similar suits from Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG and Round Hill stretching back to 2023, with the arrival of Sony and Warner meaning the publishing arms of all three major music companies are now in court against the Claude maker.
The underlying question is bigger than what Claude can generate on command. It’s whether Anthropic was entitled to use these songs in its training data at all. For now, the publishers look intent on making sure the company doesn’t get everything it wants for Christmas.
