Sony Music and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over Song Lyrics in Claude’s Training Data
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have sued Anthropic in California over song lyrics allegedly taken from pirate archives, naming Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally and seeking up to $150,000 per composition. A Munich court ruled in November 2025 that memorising lyrics inside a model is reproduction and that the text and data mining exception does not cover it.
The Allegations
The publishers allege a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale”. The works named include familiar songs like "Eye of the Tiger," "Hallelujah," "September," "Livin’ On a Prayer," and "Great Balls of Fire," alongside compositions by Mariah Carey and Taylor Swift.
This route is one Anthropic has navigated before. The complaint points to Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, the same archives behind the $1.5B settlement it reached with authors.
The Publishers’ Demands
The publishers want a jury and statutory damages. They seek up to $150,000 for each composition used in training, which is the statutory ceiling for willful infringement rather than a figure any court has awarded.
In comparison, the last case paid authors about $3,000 per title, split with their publisher, leaving roughly $1,500 each side.
Precedents and Legal Considerations
A European court has already addressed a similar issue, ruling against OpenAI in November 2025. The court found that memorising lyrics inside a model is reproduction, and that outputs reciting them are communication to the public. The text and data mining exception was found not to apply, as permanent memorisation goes beyond transient analysis, and the rightsholder had opted out.
European law also includes a second condition that matters here: it applies only to works the miner had lawful access to, and a pirate library is never lawful access. Additionally, the AI Act requires general-purpose model providers to keep a copyright policy and publish a summary of their training data, policed by an enforcement unit in Brussels.
An Asymmetry in Legal Protections
The key asymmetry lies in the difference between how American and European rightsholders enforce their rights. American rightsholders go to court to find out what was taken from them, while European ones are entitled to be told.