Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic Over Tens of Thousands of Songs Used to Train $2 Trillion AI Firm

A legal action filed by Sony Music and Warner Chappell targets Anthropic and founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann for the alleged theft of a massive library of music to develop its Claude models. The complaint claims Anthropic used torrenting and scraping to acquire tens of thousands of copyrighted compositions, including "Eye of the Tiger" and "All I Want for Christmas is You." These works were allegedly used as training inputs and appeared in model outputs, causing harm to songwriters and publishers.

The lawsuit highlights a previous $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic paid after a court found it illegally torrented over 7 million books from sites like Library Genesis. The publishers claim the $2 trillion company views such penalties as the cost of doing business while continuing to build its business model on copyright infringement.