Two of the world's largest music publishers are suing Anthropic, the company behind the AI system Claude, for allegedly stealing copyrighted works.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell are among a group suing the AI company, its co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann.
Sony and Warner allege Anthropic conducted a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading” the sheet music and lyrics to songs including ‘Uptown Funk’ and ‘Cruel Summer’ to train Claude.
Editorial note: The Daily Aus has had commercial partnerships with both Anthropic and Warner. Partnering with a range of brands keeps our content free for you. Anthropic and Warner have no involvement in, or influence over, our editorial content, including this piece.
Background
Claude is a popular large language model (LLM) built by the AI company Anthropic.
LLMs are trained by processing massive amounts of text to learn how to generate human-like language.
To obtain this text, AI companies have scraped websites and large collections of books and articles.
The legality of these practices is disputed.
Anthropic and other AI companies have faced lawsuits accusing them of illegally obtaining copyrighted material.
The lawsuit
Your contribution ensures The Daily Aus can continue doing the work you love.
I want to give $10 monthly to help TDA keep doing the news.
Your details:
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell allege Mann personally torrented millions of pirated books at Amodei’s direction, of which hundreds contained copyrighted lyrics and sheet music.
They allege Anthropic scraped lyrics from websites, removed songwriter credits, and created models that reproduce their lyrics word-for-word or closely mirror them.
The songs allegedly stolen by Anthropic include ‘Uptown Funk’, ‘Cruel Summer’, ‘Hallelujah’, ‘Eye of the Tiger’, and ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’.
The publishers are seeking damages of up to $US150,000 ($AU210,000) per song and up to $US25,000 ($AU35,000) each time songwriter credits were removed.
With tens of thousands of songs allegedly stolen, the total damages could be in the billions of dollars.
Other lawsuits
In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to a $US1.5 billion ($AU2.1 billion) settlement with authors whose works were pirated. It was the largest copyright payout in U.S. history and received final court approval in July 2026.
The judge in that case ruled that while training AI on lawfully obtained text could be legal, obtaining it through piracy was not.
What’s next?
TDA reached out to Anthropic, which said: “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.”
Anthropic is aiming to go public in the near future, reportedly looking at a valuation of $US2 trillion ($AU2.8 trillion).
