Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic Over Music Used in AI Training
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden ● Covered by 4 sources
Sony and Warner are suing Anthropic over songs they say were pirated for AI training. The claim says tens of thousands of tracks were copied, and the bill could reach billions.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have taken Anthropic to court over how the company allegedly built parts of its AI system. The lawsuit, made public over the weekend, says Anthropic obtained musical works on a huge scale through illegal torrent networks and then copied them, including for training its Claude models.
The complaint says the affected material runs into “tens of thousands” of compositions. Among the songs named are All I Want For Christmas Is You and Eye Of The Tiger. The publishers, according to Music Business Worldwide, call the case “one of the largest and most brazen ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”
The suit also names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants. The publishers argue they are personally responsible for downloading pirated works through Libgen and Pilimi. Another claim concerns the removal or alteration of copyright management information.
The money on the line is enormous. The publishers are seeking up to $150,000 for each willfully infringed work, plus up to $25,000 for every alleged removal of copyright management information. On paper, that puts Anthropic’s exposure in the range of several billion dollars. They also want all infringing copies destroyed and a full accounting of the training data behind Claude.
A big part of the argument leans on Anthropic’s earlier settlement with authors, which the company reached about a year ago for $1.5 billion over an estimated seven million books allegedly downloaded from piracy sites. The music publishers say that deal sets a clear benchmark. Anthropic says it disagrees with the allegations and will fight the case in court. And it is not the only one under pressure: Universal Music Publishing Group and BMG have already sued on similar grounds, turning this into a broader test of how far AI developers can go with copyrighted material.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the bill coming due for the “move fast and ask for forgiveness” era of AI. If a company sells itself as ethical while allegedly treating copyright like a buffet, nobody should be shocked when the music industry brings a bigger knife. The real story is not just one lawsuit; it’s that the same training-data mess keeps resurfacing because the incentives were rotten from the start.
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