Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music, and 33 other partner music publishers, totaling 35 companies, have filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In addition to the AI company Anthropic, the plaintiffs directly named the two co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, as individual defendants, an unusual move that places the founders on the defendant list.
"One of the most open acts of intellectual property theft in history"
In a 48-page complaint, the plaintiffs accuse Anthropic of mass stealing thousands of copyrighted musical works, including lyrics and sheet music, without authorization through methods such as BT seed downloads and web crawlers. This includes multiple classic songs by well-known artists like Taylor Swift. The materials were used to train the Claude large model and achieve product iteration and commercial profits through infringing data, which the plaintiffs have characterized as "one of the largest and most blatant acts of intellectual property theft in history."
Regarding the claim for damages, the plaintiffs are requesting the court to issue an injunction to prevent Anthropic from continuing to use the relevant copyrighted materials. Under U.S. copyright law, each infringing work can be claimed up to $150,000, with an additional $25,000 for each instance of altered or removed copyright management information. With tens of thousands of works involved, if all claims are at the maximum level, the total claim amount could reach several billion dollars.
Anthropic publicly responded that it does not agree with all the accusations made by the publishers and will actively defend itself in court to protect its rights. This is not the first time the company has been involved in a copyright lawsuit — it has previously faced multiple lawsuits from writers, publishers, Universal, and Concord, among others, and had previously reached a $1.5 billion settlement with a group of writers. This latest lawsuit comes at a critical period when Anthropic is preparing for a significant IPO, undoubtedly adding uncertainty to its listing process.
