Sony, Warner Sue Anthropic Over AI Music Training, Seek $150K Per Song

The music publishing arms of Sony Music and Warner Music have taken Sony and Warner’s copyright fight to the AI industry, suing Anthropic over how its Claude model was trained. In other news, the case adds to a growing pile of copyright litigation targeting frontier AI labs.

What the lawsuit alleges

The music publishing branches of Sony Music and Warner Music have sued Anthropic in California federal court for allegedly misusing their copyrighted song compositions to train its Claude AI models.

Sony and Warner said in the complaint, filed on Friday, that Anthropic pirated hundreds of song lyrics and sheet music from The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson and hundreds of other artists to train Claude to respond to human prompts.

The complaint accuses Anthropic of obtaining copyrighted works through digital piracy archives, including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Among the material allegedly downloaded from those sites were books containing lyrics and sheet music for songs such as “Livin’ On a Prayer,” “Hallelujah,” and “Great Balls of Fire.”

The damages math

The publishers are seeking damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed copyright, a figure that could push the case into the billions of dollars depending on how many works are found to have been infringed.

The publishers contend that training Claude on these works allows it to reproduce near-identical copies of the compositions and generate AI lyrics that compete with human-made songs. They are also asking for an injunction blocking further use of the material.

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Not Anthropic’s first copyright fight

Anthropic became the first AI company to settle one of the disputes last year, when it paid $1.5 billion to resolve a class action from a group of authors. The publishers argue that outcome has not changed Anthropic’s behavior.

“Anthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright theft,” Sony and Warner said in their complaint. “And $1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering 2-trillion-dollar valuation.”

Universal Music Group sued Anthropic in 2023 and earlier this year over the alleged use of copyrighted song lyrics in AI training, in lawsuits that are still ongoing.

Why this matters for AI valuations

Anthropic is private, but its investor base runs through the biggest public tech names. Any legal framework that forces AI labs to license training data would raise costs across the industry and could compress the economics that Big Tech has priced into its AI capex plans.

The music publishers are also going after an injunction, not just money. If granted, that would set a precedent that could ripple to every generative model trained on scraped media.

Options market and stocks to watch

Watch for reaction across AI-exposed names and Anthropic backers as the case develops:

• SONY: watch for headline moves as Sony Music Publishing pushes the case and any settlement chatter emerges.
• WMG: Warner Music Group is the other plaintiff; watch for sympathy bids on any favorable rulings.
• GOOGL: Alphabet is a major Anthropic investor; watch for spillover into AI-liability narratives.
• AMZN: Amazon has committed billions to Anthropic; watch for flow tied to AI training-data risk.
• UMG: Universal already has its own suits against Anthropic; watch for read-through as those cases progress.

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