Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic and co‑founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann in a California court on 28 August, alleging the company trained its Claude family of models on “tens of thousands” of copyrighted musical compositions without licensing them. The complaint names songs including 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 and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, and says Anthropic downloaded at least 7 million books and other works in prior litigation. Plaintiffs accuse Anthropic of “torrenting, scraping and downloading” lyrics and sheet music from pirate sites and of scraping legal lyric services such as Musixmatch and LyricFind and archive datasets like Common Crawl. The suit also alleges Anthropic stripped identifying metadata from texts, depriving publishers of attribution, and calls the activity “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” Sony and Warner are seeking damages that could run into billions, citing statutory awards up to $150,000 per infringed work and $25,000 for each removal or alteration of identifying data. The filing follows earlier claims against Anthropic by authors (a $1.5bn settlement) and separate disputes from Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group; the complaint was first reported by Music Business Worldwide.
