Sony (SONY) and Warner Music (WMG) sued Anthropic in California federal court, alleging the AI company illegally obtained and copied thousands of copyrighted musical compositions to develop and operate its Claude AI models, according to a complaint filed Friday.

The complaint alleges Anthropic obtained copyrighted lyrics and sheet music through torrenting, scraping and downloading, including from sources such as Library Genesis, Pirate Library Mirror, MusixMatch and LyricFind, and used the works as inputs to train Claude.

The publishers also allege Claude can reproduce copyrighted lyrics verbatim or near-verbatim and generate new lyrics that compete with their works, according to the complaint.

The publishers are seeking up to $150,000 for each infringed work, along with injunctive relief.

Reuters reported Monday that Anthropic said it would defend itself robustly and called the lawsuit the third brought by the same lawyers. Anthropic also argued that AI training can constitute fair use.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to MT Newswires' request for comment.

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