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 and in the outputs those models generate.” Scraping and distributing Musixmatch content violates the site’s user agreement , and LyricFind’s privacy policy similarly prohibits reproduction “unless otherwise stated,” the suit states.

Sony and Warner are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each song the court finds Anthropic to have infringed willfully.

They are also seeking as much as $25,000 for each instance in which copyright-management information was allegedly removed from a work.

With the complaint covering at least “thousands if not tens of thousands” of works, the potential damages could reach into the billions of dollars.

Among the songs named in the complaint are Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings” and “Cruel Summer.” Anthropic rejected the allegations and said the company will “defend ourselves robustly” in court.

“This is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune .

It’s true that Anthropic has some history with the law firm: Oppenheim and Zebrak , which represents Sony and Warner in the new suit, first sued Anthropic in Oct.

2023 alongside Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO over roughly 500 songs.