Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC v. Anthropic PBC

Summary

AI law Major music publishers brought a civil copyright action against AI developer Anthropic and its founders for utilizing copyrighted musical compositions to train, fine-tune, and deploy commercial large language models without authorization. The filing alleges that the defendant unlawfully harvested lyrics and sheet music via BitTorrent libraries, web scraping, and third-party datasets to create a centralized training corpus for its Claude AI suite. The suit contends that these practices infringe exclusive rights by generating verbatim lyric outputs, derivative works, and market-substitute lyrics that directly compete with protected compositions. Data law The lawsuit asserts claims against the AI developer for systematically stripping statutory metadata and attribution details from harvested texts during data curation. The filing alleges the company utilized automated extraction algorithms to scrub copyright management information, including titles, author names, and rights ownership notices, from licensed lyrics scraped across the web. This data stripping was allegedly executed to conceal underlying copyright infringement and prevent model guardrails from displaying original attribution alongside generated outputs

AI-drafted · Attorney-reviewed