Most lawsuits require you to prove actual losses. Copyright law has a shortcut: statutory damages. If your work was registered before infringement occurred, you can skip proving harm and claim a fixed amount per work — up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement.

That ceiling sounds manageable for one song. But AI training datasets contain thousands of works. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic alleging Claude was trained on tens of thousands of copyrighted compositions — at $150,000 per work, exposure scales into the billions.

This is why music publishers are especially powerful plaintiffs. They hold individually registered copyrights on every composition, so a single training run touching thousands of songs triggers thousands of separate statutory damage claims — each carrying that ceiling — without the publisher needing to prove a single lost sale.