The music publishing arms of Sony Music and Warner Music filed a lawsuit in California federal court on Friday against Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, alleging that it illegally used hundreds of copyrighted song lyrics and sheet music to train its AI models. The complaint names works by some of the world's most recognised artists, including The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson, and Mariah Carey, and seeks damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed copyright, as well as a court order barring Anthropic from further use of their works.
According to the complaint, Anthropic obtained the publishers' lyrics and sheet music through torrent downloads — a method of peer-to-peer file sharing typically associated with piracy — rather than through licensed channels. Sony and Warner argue that lyrics are not freely available online; websites that display song lyrics pay for licences to do so, often funding those fees through advertising revenue. The publishers allege that Claude can reproduce copyrighted lyrics "verbatim" when prompted, and that the company used their catalogues to teach the AI to generate new song lyrics that act as "harmful market substitutes" for original works.
The lawsuit arrives amid a broader wave of copyright litigation brought by authors, news organisations, music labels, and publishers against AI companies over the use of creative works in training datasets. Universal Music Group has already sued Anthropic twice — in 2023 and again earlier this year — in cases still before the courts. Anthropic made history last year by becoming the first AI company to settle such a dispute, paying $1.5 billion to resolve a class action brought by a group of authors who alleged their books had been used without permission to train Claude. A German court also ruled against OpenAI, a rival AI company, late last year in a case brought by the German music rights organisation GEMA.
Sony and Warner pointedly cited that settlement in their complaint, arguing it had failed to deter Anthropic. "Anthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business," they wrote, adding that $1.5 billion was "obviously not a large enough settlement" for a company they say has reached a valuation of $2 trillion on the back of what they characterise as mass copyright infringement. Anthropic pushed back firmly, with a spokesperson calling the suit "the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts" and pledging to defend itself "robustly." The company maintains that using copyrighted material to train AI constitutes fair use under United States law.
The outcome of this and related cases is likely to shape how the AI industry licenses — or justifies not licensing — the creative content that underpins its products. For the music industry, the stakes extend beyond financial compensation: publishers argue that without enforceable copyright protections, both songwriters and the companies that represent them risk losing a core revenue stream to AI systems trained on their own work.