Sony and Warner sue Anthropic for $150k per copyrighted work

sony music and warner chappell have filed a lawsuit against anthropic in the us district court for the northern district of california, seeking damages for tens of thousands of copyrighted works. the companies are asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance when identifiable copyright data was stripped, potentially amounting to several billion dollars. the lawsuit alleges that anthropic, along with its co-founders dario amodei and benjamin mann, conducted a large-scale illegal downloading and scraping of copyrighted works to develop and operate anthropic's 'claude' series of ai models. specific songs found in anthropic's training data include marvin gaye and tammi terrell's 'ain't no mountain high enough,' bon jovi's 'livin' on a prayer,' and taylor swift's 'paper rings.'