Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in a Northern California court, accusing the AI company of using copyrighted song lyrics in its training data without permission. The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic engaged in a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale".
The complaint names Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally and seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per composition. The works in question include familiar songs like "Eye of the Tiger," "Hallelujah," "September," "Livin' On a Prayer," and "Great Balls of Fire," as well as compositions by Mariah Carey and Taylor Swift.
The lawsuit claims that Anthropic obtained the copyrighted works from pirate archives, including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, which were also involved in a previous $1.5 billion settlement with authors. The publishers are seeking a jury trial and statutory damages, which could potentially result in a significant payout if the court rules in their favor.
A similar case in Europe has already set a precedent for the use of copyrighted song lyrics in AI training data. In November 2025, the Regional Court of Munich ruled against OpenAI, finding that memorizing lyrics inside a model constitutes reproduction and that outputs reciting them are communication to the public. The court also found that the text and data mining exception does not apply in such cases, as permanent memorization goes beyond transient analysis and the rightsholder had opted out.
The EU's AI Act also requires general-purpose model providers to keep a copyright policy and publish a summary of their training data, which is policed by an enforcement unit in Brussels. This highlights an asymmetry between American and European rightsholders, where European ones are entitled to be told what works are being used in AI training data, while American rightsholders must go to court to find out.
Este artículo fue escrito con la asistencia de IA.
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