Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over lyrics training

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed the suit on 28 August in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint names Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants. It alleges the company copied tens of thousands of the publishers' song compositions to train its Claude models without permission.

The publishers seek up to $150,000 for each work found to be willfully infringed and up to $25,000 for each instance in which copyright management information was removed. The complaint says the potential damages could reach into the billions. Axios noted that statutory damages do not require proof of lost sales.

The complaint says Anthropic obtained lyrics and sheet music through BitTorrent downloads from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, and by scraping licensed lyric sites Musixmatch and LyricFind. It says Mann used BitTorrent in 2021 to download at least five million pirated books, and that employees pulled at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror in 2022. The publishers say those hauls included songbooks and sheet-music collections containing their compositions, and that they never licensed any of it.

Claude can reproduce lyrics "verbatim" when prompted, the complaint says. Songs named in the filing include "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "All I Want for Christmas Is You," "Eye of the Tiger," "Livin' on a Prayer," "Hallelujah" and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings." The publishers also argue Claude can generate new lyrics that compete with the originals as market substitutes.

Anthropic's response

Anthropic rejected the allegations. A spokesperson said the case is "the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts." The company said training generative AI models is a transformative fair use, as the court held in Bartz v. Anthropic, and that it will defend the case in court.

Anthropic settled Bartz, the authors' class action, for $1.5 billion in September 2025. Judge William Alsup ruled in June 2025 that training models on lawfully acquired books was "quintessentially transformative." The same ruling held that a permanent library of pirated books was not protected. The publishers say $1.5 billion was too small a deterrent for a company they say turned mass infringement into a $2 trillion valuation.

Earlier suits

Oppenheim and Zebrak, the firm behind the new suit, first sued Anthropic in October 2023 for Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO over roughly 500 songs. The same publishers filed a second suit through the firm in January covering more than 20,000 works and seeking over $3 billion. BMG and Round Hill Music have also sued Anthropic over music this year, Fortune reported. Round Hill has said it may amend its complaints to cover 10,000 or more works.

The new complaint is wider-ranging than its predecessors and draws on evidence from the earlier litigation, TechCrunch reported.

What happens next

The complaint asks the court to bar Anthropic from using the publishers' works, order the destruction of infringing copies and require an accounting of Claude's training data. It also seeks a jury trial. Anthropic has said it will fight the case.