Sony Music and Warner sue Anthropic for intellectual property theft

Both sides, in good faith

The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.

The case for

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell argue that songwriters and rights-holders spent decades building catalogues protected by clear copyright law, and that Anthropic obtained many of these works through torrenting and scraping rather than licensing, bypassing the market entirely. They contend that a company built on respecting rules of consent and compensation should not be permitted to profit from wholesale, unauthorised copying simply because the output is transformed by an algorithm, especially given a prior court finding against Anthropic over pirated books. Holding executives personally accountable, in their view, reflects the deliberateness of a decision made at the top of the company rather than an incidental technical oversight.

The case against

Anthropic and its supporters would argue that training AI models on widely available text and data, including song lyrics, plausibly falls within fair use because the process extracts statistical patterns rather than reproducing or distributing the original works themselves. They would point out that copyright law was not designed with machine learning in mind, and that innovation in the field depends on access to large, diverse datasets that no company could feasibly license work-by-work in advance. From this perspective, aggressive litigation and maximalist statutory damages claims risk being used less to compensate specific harm and more to entrench incumbent industry gatekeepers against a disruptive new technology.