Sony Music and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over Alleged Music Copyright Theft
In a major legal escalation for generative AI companies, music industry titans Sony Music Group and Warner Chappell Music have filed a joint federal lawsuit against Anthropic. The complaint accuses Anthropic of engaging in a systematic and unauthorized campaign to ingest copyrighted song lyrics, compositions, and musical audio into its Claude AI model architecture.
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The plaintiffs allege that Claude generates near-identical outputs of copyrighted song lyrics when prompted, undermining licensing agreements. Music publishers are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work alongside permanent injunctions prohibiting unauthorized musical dataset ingest by commercial AI models.