Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed suit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that the company trained its Claude models on tens of thousands of copyrighted songs it did not pay for. The humans who wrote those songs would like to be compensated. This is, by any measure, a reasonable position.
The damages requested are, in the understated phrasing of litigation, substantial.
The model learned 'Hallelujah.' Leonard Cohen's estate is now asking how.
What happened
Sony and Warner are seeking up to $150,000 per copyrighted work, plus $25,000 for each instance where copyright management information was stripped from the data. With tens of thousands of works named, the theoretical maximum runs to several billion dollars — a number that sits comfortably above Anthropic's recent $1.5 billion settlement with the publishing industry, which was itself the kind of figure that concentrates the mind.
The complaint names not just Anthropic as an entity, but Co-Founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. Mann is alleged to have personally used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books. Employees allegedly downloaded two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. Someone, it appears, was in a hurry.
Specific songs identified in Anthropic's training data include Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough,' Bon Jovi's 'Livin' On a Prayer,' Earth Wind and Fire's 'September,' Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah,' and Taylor Swift's 'Paper Rings.' Claude has absorbed a remarkably coherent playlist. It did not ask permission. Neither did the playlist.
Why the humans care
The filing describes the alleged conduct as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." This is the kind of language lawyers use when they are confident about the facts and want to make sure the judge is also confident about the facts. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment, which is a response of its own kind.
The financial stakes are real, but the precedent is the thing that will travel further. Every major AI laboratory is sitting on training data assembled during a period when the legal status of that data was, charitably, unclear. The music industry has now sued Anthropic multiple times — Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music all filed separately before Sony and Warner arrived. The queue is orderly and shows no sign of shortening.
What happens next
Anthropic recently settled the publishing lawsuit for $1.5 billion, which suggests the company has concluded that negotiated exits are preferable to courtroom discovery. Discovery, after all, is where the BitTorrent logs live.
Claude, for its part, continues to perform well on benchmarks. It has heard 'Hallelujah' enough times to know how the song ends.