Anthropic Trained on Mariah Carey, Taylor Swift Songs Without Permission; Sony, Warner Call It “Largest Theft in History”

The stark face of intellectual-property theft and Big Tech’s moral hazard

Global artificial intelligence company Anthropic is facing potentially massive copyright lawsuits from major music publishers and record companies. Sony Music and Warner Chappell Music, among others, have taken legal action, accusing the company of using songs by pop stars signed to their labels as training data without permission.

According to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the music companies say Anthropic illegally siphoned off the lyrics and sheet music for tens of thousands of songs and used them to train its AI models. The plaintiffs denounced the conduct as “the largest and most blatant theft of intellectual property in history” and are seeking punitive damages of up to $150,000, or about 200 million won, for each allegedly copied song.

Evidence has also emerged that pirated books from illicit websites, scanned files and crawled data were used on a massive scale. Thousands of globally beloved songs, including Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” became victims of unauthorized training.

Allegations of an organized cover-up and pressure to permanently destroy data

The music companies also leveled a serious allegation that Anthropic intentionally manipulated or deleted copyright-management information, or CMI, to conceal its illegal activity. As a result, when users of the AI model Claude asked for the lyrics to specific songs, the system allegedly generated the full lyrics without even minimal attribution to the original copyright holders, producing widespread and serious infringements.

The plaintiffs have urged the court to award substantial damages and to order the permanent destruction of all illegally copied lyric databases and training files created by Anthropic. The defendants include not only the company but also key executives, including CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann, intensifying the debate over accountability.

Anthropic previously agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion, or about 2 trillion won, to settle allegations that it had trained on pirated books without permission. The music companies criticized the company, saying, “They are treating settlement payments as merely a cost of doing business while continuing to break the law.” Anthropic, for its part, has maintained that it “cannot agree with those claims and will vigorously defend itself in court,” setting the stage for a fierce legal battle.