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.

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have sued Anthropic in a Northern California court. Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann are named personally, Business Insider reported.

The language is not restrained. The publishers allege a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale“.

The works named are familiar. Eye of the Tiger, Hallelujah, September, Livin’ On a Prayer and Great Balls of Fire are among them, alongside Mariah Carey and Taylor Swift compositions.

The route alleged is one Anthropic has been here for 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 want a jury and statutory damages. Up to $150,000 for each composition used in training, which is the statutory ceiling for wilful infringement rather than a figure any court has awarded.

Set that against what the last case paid. Authors received about $3,000 a title, split with their publisher, leaving roughly $1,500 each side.

The gap between those two figures is the whole negotiation. One is a number two sides agreed on, the other is an opening demand in a case nobody has answered yet.

A European court has already answered a version of this question, and it was about song lyrics too. The defendant was a different company.

The Regional Court of Munich ruled against OpenAI in November 2025, finding that memorising lyrics inside a model is reproduction, and that outputs reciting them are communication to the public.

It also found the text and data mining exception did not cover it. Permanent memorisation goes beyond transient analysis, and the rightsholder had opted out. The judgment is not final.

Europe’s exception carries a second condition that matters more here. It applies only to works the miner had lawful access to, and a pirate library is never lawful access.

On top of that sits the AI Act. General purpose model providers must keep a copyright policy and publish a summary of their training data, policed by an enforcement unit in Brussels.

Which is the asymmetry worth naming. American rightsholders go to court to find out what was taken from them, and European ones are entitled to be told.