Sony And Warner Music Sue Anthropic Over AI Song Training

Hyderabad: Sony Music and Warner Music have filed a lawsuit against Artificial Intelligence (AI) company Anthropic, accusing it of using their copyrighted songs without permission to train its Claude AI models.

The lawsuit, filed in a California federal court on Friday, was brought by the music publishing arms of both companies. They claim Anthropic used hundreds of song lyrics and sheet music from artists including the Beatles, Taylor Swift, and Michael Jackson to train Claude to respond to user prompts.

This is the latest in a growing number of lawsuits filed against AI companies by authors, publishers, music labels, and news organisations, all raising concerns about copyrighted material being used to train AI systems.

Universal Music Group has also sued Anthropic twice, in 2023 and earlier this year, over similar claims. Both cases are still ongoing.

Last year, Anthropic became the first AI company to settle such a dispute, agreeing to pay $1.5billion to resolve a class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors.

In their complaint, Sony and Warner argued that this earlier settlement has not been enough to stop Anthropic's practices, suggesting the company may treat such payouts as a routine business cost rather than a deterrent.

Responding to the lawsuit, an Anthropic spokesperson said the case was the third of its kind from the same legal team and repeated claims already being heard in other ongoing cases. The company said it plans to defend itself strongly, maintaining that using copyrighted material to train AI qualifies as fair use, a position it says was supported by the judge in the earlier authors' case. Representatives for Sony and Warner Music did not immediately comment on the lawsuit.

According to the complaint, Anthropic obtained the lyrics and sheet music through illegal torrent downloads, and Claude has been shown to reproduce copyrighted lyrics word-for-word when prompted.

The publishers also allege that Anthropic used their songs to train Claude to generate large volumes of new AI-generated lyrics, which they argue directly compete with the original copyrighted works.

Sony and Warner are seeking damages of up to $150,000 for each copyrighted work found to have been infringed, along with a court order that would stop Anthropic from using their music in the future. The case adds to a wider legal battle between the entertainment industry and AI developers over the use of creative content in machine learning training.