Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging the AI company unlawfully used "tens of thousands" of copyrighted songs, including tracks by Mariah Carey, Marvin Gaye and Survivor, to train its Claude chatbot. The publishers, who manage rights on behalf of songwriters, describe it as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history", and the case adds to mounting legal pressure on Anthropic as it prepares for a stock market listing potentially valued at $2tn.

The suit, filed in a California court on 28 August, names Anthropic, chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann, accusing them of torrenting, scraping and downloading lyrics and sheet music, including songs such as Livin' on a Prayer and Hallelujah, and reproducing them in chatbot responses. It also alleges Anthropic stripped identifying data from works to avoid attribution and licensing fees, and is seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work plus $25,000 per instance of data removal, potentially totalling billions of dollars. The claim follows a $1.5bn settlement Anthropic reached with US authors, and comes alongside separate copyright disputes involving Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and, in a related industry case, AI music generator Suno's loss to Germany's GEMA.