Sony and Warner sue Anthropic over pirated lyrics to train Claude
The publishers want up to $150K per song across tens of thousands of works — and lean on the Bartz ruling that already cost Anthropic $1.5B.
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The charge: how Claude was fed, not that it was fed
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and other publishers accuse Anthropic of a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading” — pulling tens of thousands of copyrighted compositions and stripping the copyright-management info off them. It was filed late Friday in the Northern District of California, and it names Dario Amodei and Ben Mann personally, not just the company.
The math: $150K a song, plus $25K per stripped credit
Statutory damages run up to $150,000 per infringed work and $25,000 for each removal of copyright-management information — spread across “tens of thousands” of songs, that stacks into the billions. The publishers have demanded a jury trial.
Why it lands: the Bartz precedent
This isn’t a fair-use gamble. The $1.5B Bartz settlement — the largest copyright payout in US history — followed a ruling that training on copyrighted works is fair use, but pirating them to get there is not. The labels are aiming straight at that second half.
The pattern: Anthropic’s third music suit of the year
Concord and Universal already sued, seeking roughly $3B, and authors settled for $1.5B. Rights holders now treat training data as a market to license — and Anthropic as the case that sets the price.
What it means if you build on Claude
Nothing changes in the API today. But the direction of travel is more provenance disclosure, licensing costs that can eventually surface in pricing, and standing questions about where any model’s training data came from. If Claude Code is in your stack, track this as a risk — it’s not a reason to rip it out.