Anthropic in Court: Sony and Warner Call It Theft
Sony Music and Warner Music Group have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the AI company of systematically reproducing copyrighted song lyrics without authorisation in what the labels describe as a "brazen campaign" of intellectual property theft, according to TechCrunch and Yahoo Finance.
Anthropic in Court: Sony and Warner Call It Theft
Sony Music and Warner Music Group have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the AI company of systematically reproducing copyrighted song lyrics without authorisation in what the labels describe as a "brazen campaign" of intellectual property theft, according to TechCrunch and Yahoo Finance.
The complaint is notably broad in scope, extending beyond incidental reproduction to allege deliberate, large-scale piracy embedded in Anthropic's training and output pipeline. The music industry's argument is straightforward: when a user asks Claude to reproduce lyrics, the model does so — and neither the artist nor the label sees a cent.
This is the most significant music copyright action against a generative AI company to date. Earlier litigation in the publishing and visual arts sectors has moved slowly through US courts, but the combined legal weight of two major labels — representing catalogues that include some of the most commercially valuable music ever recorded — raises the stakes considerably.
Anthropic has not yet filed a formal response. The company has previously argued that AI training on publicly available data constitutes fair use under US copyright law, a position courts have not yet definitively accepted or rejected.
The outcome will shape how every AI developer in the world — including those operating under Malta's MiCA-adjacent frameworks — licenses creative content going forward.
The lyrics were always someone's. The question now is whether the law agrees.
