Sony and Warner Music sue Anthropic over alleged theft of ‘tens of thousands’ of songs, including ‘I Am the Walrus’ and ‘Hallelujah’

Last month, Anthropic was at the center of public backlash for a plan, called “Project Panama,” to “destructively scan all the books in the world” to train its Claude AI models. Now, the AI company finds itself again facing the (copyright) music.

Sony Music and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic, naming CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants, for what the suit characterizes as illegally downloading, scraping and torrenting “thousands upon thousands” of copyrighted songs to train its AI models.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Northern California, alleges that Anthropic obtained lyrics and sheet music through pirate sources including Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror, and, according to the complaint, scraped licensed lyric websites, such as Musixmatch and LyricFind. The publishers allege the material was then incorporated into Claude’s training data and that the model can reproduce copyrighted lyrics.

“In blatant violation of copyright law, Defendants have unlawfully acquired troves of Music Publishers’ musical compositions, and then systematically copied those works multiple times,” the filing read, “including as the inputs to train Anthropic’s Claude AI models........

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