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Music publishers sue Anthropic over alleged scraping of song lyrics
The complaint, filed in a California court, names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann and alleges the models reproduced lyrics in response to user prompts.
Music publishers Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have sued Anthropic, alleging its Claude AI models scraped and misused copyrighted songs, including Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You, and lyrics tied to titles such as Eye of the Tiger and Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. The publishers are seeking damages, arguing the alleged conduct amounts to one of the largest ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history, according to The Guardian Business.
The lawsuit, filed on 28 August in California, targets Anthropic and executives Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The complaint says Anthropic breached copyright law by torrenting, scraping, and downloading lyrics from copyrighted works to train Claude models, and also reproducing those lyrics in responses to prompts.
The publishers further allege Anthropic acquired copies of copyrighted material through other channels, including scraping lyrics from legal sites such as Musixmatch and LyricFind, and using datasets from archive sites like Common Crawl. It also claims the defendants downloaded at least 7 million copies of books from pirate websites, including lyrics and sheet music for songs such as Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
The Guardian Business says the figures cited in the suit draw on a recent copyright case against Anthropic brought by US authors, which the company settled for $1.5 billion. The complaint also alleges Anthropic stripped identifying information from songs, and it lists additional tracks including Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk and Katy Perry’s California Gurls.