Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic, accusing the AI company of using copyrighted music without permission to train its Claude models.
The lawsuit was filed Friday in federal court in Northern California and also names Anthropic cofounders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann.
In the complaint, the publishers allege that Anthropic carried out a large-scale effort to torrent, scrape, and download copyrighted material to develop and operate Claude.
Anthropic rejected the allegations, saying it disagrees with the publishers' claims and plans to defend itself in court.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell claim Anthropic obtained thousands of copyrighted songs, including works such as "Eye of the Tiger," "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You," and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings."
The publishers allege that some of the material was obtained through piracy archives including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. They say pirated books downloaded by Anthropic also contained lyrics and sheet music for songs such as "Livin' on a Prayer," "September," "Great Balls of Fire," "Ramblin' Man," and "Hallelujah."
The lawsuit further claims Claude can sometimes generate identical or nearly identical versions of copyrighted material in response to user prompts. The publishers argue that training AI systems on copyrighted songs could also allow AI-generated music and lyrics to compete with work created by human artists and songwriters.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have requested a jury trial and are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each copyrighted composition Anthropic is found to have improperly used.
The case is the latest in a growing wave of copyright disputes involving artificial intelligence companies, which require enormous amounts of data to train large language models.
Anthropic has faced similar litigation before. In September 2025, the company agreed to pay more than $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit involving allegedly pirated books. Other AI companies, including OpenAI, have also faced lawsuits from publishers and media organizations over the use of copyrighted material in AI training.