Sony and Warner Say Anthropic Built Claude on Pirated Music

Sony and Warner Say Anthropic Built Claude on Pirated Music
Music publishers portray Anthropic’s training practices as industrial-scale piracy, while the AI company had not publicly answered the new allegations before the reports were published. The dispute tests whether the fast-growing market for generative AI can keep relying on vast datasets without crossing copyright’s hard lines.

The fight follows earlier litigation over Claude’s training material. In June 2025, a judge found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million pirated books for Claude, according to one account of the new complaint. The publishers say that collection included books containing lyrics and sheet music for hundreds of their compositions, turning a books-piracy controversy into a fresh music-rights battle.

Then, late Friday, Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and other publishers sued Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann in federal court in Northern California. Their complaint alleges a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works” to build, operate and profit from the Claude models.

The suit says Anthropic obtained “thousands upon thousands” of songs, naming works from Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger to Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You and Taylor Swift’s Paper Rings. The publishers allege the company used pirate archives including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, and that Claude can return identical or near-identical reproductions of protected material. Their broader warning is commercial: training on copyrighted songs could help generate lyrics that compete with human writers.

The legal theory echoes the earlier authors’ case but presses a sharper distinction: using copyrighted works in training may be argued as lawful, while acquiring them through piracy is not. Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in the Bartz case after that distinction proved decisive, according to reporting on the music lawsuit. Sony and Warner now seek a jury trial and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per composition, insisting that “even the most revolutionary of technologies must develop within the bounds of the law.”

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