The battle over how tech companies train their digital brains is heating up again. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music just filed a massive lawsuit against Anthropic in a Northern California federal court. The music giants claim the startup and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, are responsible for one of the biggest thefts of intellectual property in history, grabbing copyrighted songs to teach the popular Claude model without permission.
Major publishers accuse the tech company of pirating musical compositions
According to the new legal filing, the music labels argue that the company gathered thousands of copyrighted works through a massive campaign of scraping, torrenting, and downloading. The affected catalog reportedly includes major hits like “Eye of the Tiger,” Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.”
The lawsuit claims that Benjamin Mann used BitTorrent software to grab millions of files from known pirate sites like Library Genesis. The publishers also allege that employees pulled lyrics from licensed websites and used those massive data sets to build their system. The labels believe this constant use of protected creative work to build modern artificial intelligence tools completely ignores basic copyright laws.
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The financial penalties in this case could reach into the billions. The two major publishers are asking for a jury trial and want up to $150,000 for every single song that the company allegedly stole. They also want the court to force the startup to destroy the pirated copies and reveal exactly what data it used to train its current software.
The complaint notes that while this new wave of AI development is exciting, companies still have to follow the rules and pay creators when they use their work. The tech startup has firmly pushed back against the claims, stating it plans to defend its actions and training methods in court.
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