Sony Music, Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over Alleged Copyright Theft

Key Points

• Sony Music and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic in federal court over alleged mass copyright infringement.
• The complaint seeks up to $150,000 per infringed work plus $25,000 for each instance of stripped copyright data.
• Co‑founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann are named as individual defendants.
• Allegations include torrenting millions of books and scraping lyrics from licensed databases.
• Specific songs cited include hits by Marvin Gaye, Bon Jovi, Earth, Wind & Fire, Leonard Cohen, and Taylor Swift.
• Anthropic previously settled a publishing‑industry case for $1.5 billion and faces other music‑industry lawsuits.
• The case could set a precedent for how copyright law applies to AI training data.