Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued AI company Anthropic, alleging that it illegally obtained and copied tens of thousands of songs to train and operate its Claude models. The case expands the music industry’s legal challenge to Anthropic, meaning the publishing divisions of all three major record companies are now pursuing claims against the company; the publishers say the alleged conduct amounts to large-scale copyright infringement.

Filed on 28 August in a California federal court, the lawsuit also names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally and seeks a jury trial, damages, destruction of infringing copies, and disclosure of Claude’s training data. The publishers seek up to $150,000 for each work found to have been wilfully infringed and up to $25,000 for each alleged removal of copyright-management information, creating potential exposure in the billions of dollars. They allege that pirated material was downloaded from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, citing findings from a separate authors’ lawsuit against Anthropic.