Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic, accusing the AI company of illegally using copyrighted lyrics and sheet music to train its Claude models.

The lawsuit alleges Anthropic conducted a “brazen campaign” of torrenting, scraping and downloading protected works on a massive scale.

Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann have also been named as defendants.

The publishers claim Anthropic obtained unauthorised material from pirate archives, licensed lyrics websites and large online datasets rather than paying for access.

They allege Claude can reproduce some copyrighted lyrics verbatim when prompted and use the material to generate new lyrics that compete with human-written compositions.

Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic Over Alleged Mass Music Copyright Theft

Songs cited in the filing include Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You, Taylor Swift’s Paper Rings, Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.

The publishers are seeking a jury trial, an order preventing Anthropic from using their works and statutory damages of up to US$150,000 (A$229,000) for each infringed composition.

They are also pursuing up to US$25,000 for each alleged removal or alteration of copyright management information. With the case said to involve tens of thousands of works, total damages could reach billions of dollars if the publishers succeed and receive the maximum awards.

Anthropic rejected the allegations and said it would defend itself “robustly”.

“Training generative AI models is a transformative fair use,” an Anthropic spokesperson said, describing the complaint as the third lawsuit from the same lawyers to recycle allegations already before the courts.

The company last year agreed to pay US$1.5 billion to settle a separate class action brought by authors over pirated books.

In that case, a judge found training AI models using copyrighted books could qualify as fair use, but acquiring those works through piracy was not protected.

Anthropic is also facing separate music copyright actions involving Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, BMG and Round Hill Music.