Music publishing heavyweights Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic and its founders--alleging the AI company unlawfully scraped, torrented, and ingested tens of thousands of copyrighted musical compositions to train its Claude models.
The legal battle between the entertainment industry and generative artificial intelligence has escalated significantly. In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the publishing arms of Sony Music and Warner Music accused Anthropic of systematic intellectual property theft. The lawsuit claims Anthropic bypassed legitimate licensing channels and instead acquired massive libraries of copyrighted lyrics and sheet music via illicit torrent networks and unauthorized web scraping to develop its Claude chatbot models. This report also indirectly indicates that Sony didn't have any issue with AI using its music to train, but they did not purchase a license.
Sony's allegations: Torrenting, scraping, and direct competition
The plaintiffs argue that Anthropic acquired "tens of thousands" of copyrighted musical works from global artists such as The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, and Earth, Wind & Fire.
Sony Music and Warner Music are suing Anthropic, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann for 'one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.' It was filed late last night, and they made no announcements, so the press has not picked it up yet.… pic.twitter.com/hcYFGGkL0k
— Andrew Curran (@AndrewCurran_) August 29, 2026
According to the complaint, Anthropic harvested these music compositions using digital piracy repositories--including Library Genesis (Libgen) and Pirate Library Mirror--alongside web-scraping pipelines that pulled lyrics directly from licensed portals like Musixmatch and LyricFind. Beyond training data ingestion, the publishers allege that Claude can reproduce copyrighted lyrics verbatim or near-verbatim upon user request, effectively acting as an unlicensed market substitute that cuts into legitimate lyric licensing revenues.
The lawsuit takes the unusual step of naming Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants, arguing they exercised direct executive oversight over the acquisition of pirated data.
Anthropic argues in its defense
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willfully infringed composition, alongside up to $25,000 per violation for the alleged removal or alteration of copyright management information. Given the thousands of catalog titles cited in the filing, Anthropic’s potential financial exposure could stretch well into the billions of dollars.
‼️Anthropic could be facing billions in damages.
— Mr Tactical (@MrTacticalX) August 31, 2026
Sony and Warner are suing the company, accusing it of pirating tens of thousands of songs to train Claude.
The lawsuit claims CEO Dario Amodei personally directed the torrenting.
They want up to $150,000 per song.
Looks like… pic.twitter.com/ejKRlzN8al
In response to the filing, Anthropic rejected the publishers' claims, stating that it disagrees with the allegations and intends to mount a robust defense in court. The company has historically leaned on "fair use" doctrine for AI training, pointing to legal precedents where large-scale model training was deemed transformative.
(Feature image credits to Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.)
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