Sony and Warner’s lawsuit against Anthropic has pushed another fight over artificial intelligence and music into federal court, with two publishing giants accusing the company behind Claude of taking thousands of copyrighted songs without permission. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music say Anthropic used pirated and scraped material to train its AI models, while Anthropic rejects the allegations. The case could carry billions in potential damages and add pressure to an already crowded copyright battle.
Sony and Warner’s Anthropic Lawsuit Targets Claude Training Data
The complaint filed Aug. 28 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California names Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants. Sony and Warner accuse them of building Claude with copyrighted material obtained through torrenting, scraping and other unauthorized methods.
Their filing says, “Among the innumerable copyrighted works Defendants illegally harvested to fuel Claude are thousands upon thousands of Music Publishers’ copyrighted musical compositions, including such beloved songs as “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “All I Want for Christmas is You,” “Eye of the Tiger,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” and “Paper Rings.”
“In blatant violation of copyright law, Defendants have unlawfully acquired troves of Music Publishers’ musical compositions, and then systematically copied those works multiple times, including as the inputs to train Anthropic’s Claude AI models and in the outputs those models generate.”
The complaint identifies “tens of thousands” of allegedly infringed compositions. Sony and Warner are seeking up to $150,000 for each work found to have been willfully infringed, plus up to $25,000 for each alleged removal of copyright management information. They also want a jury trial, destruction of infringing copies and an accounting of Claude’s training data.
Publishers Point to Earlier Piracy Findings
A judge in Bartz v. Anthropic described some of the company’s conduct as “straightforward piracy but at massive scale.” Sony and Warner allege Mann used BitTorrent in 2021 to download at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis, while Anthropic employees later torrented at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror.
“Dr. Amodei and Mr. Mann are personally liable for their respective roles in this illegal torrenting of pirated copies of Music Publishers‘ works from LibGen and PiLiMi,” the complaint states. The filing cites Mann’s description of LibGen as “sketchy AF.” It says Anthropic’s Archive Team called it a “blatant violation of copyright.”
The publishers add, “[we] bring this action to hold accountable the culprits behind one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history. Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s “Claude” series of artificial intelligence (“AI”) models.”
They further allege Anthropic scraped lyrics from licensed sites, used a “destructive scanning” process on secondhand books and relied on datasets including Common Crawl, The Pile and Books3. The complaint says Mann downloaded pirated books “to avoid the trouble of paying for them, hoping they might prove useful for training large language models (LLMs) or something else.” A 2024 Anthropic planning document quoted in the filing stated, “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
Anthropic Pushes Back as Music Lawsuits Pile Up
Sony and Warner claim Claude can reproduce copyrighted lyrics and that safeguards added after earlier litigation are “easily circumventable by simply ‘re-prompting’” the model. The filing references Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with book authors in 2025 and argues, “But Anthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright theft.” It adds, “And $1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation.”
The complaint also says, “Despite branding itself as the ‘ethical AI company,’ Anthropic has repeatedly acted in ways that belie that image, prioritizing competitive advantage over compliance with the law.” Sony and Warner say they support licensed AI use: “Music Publishers recognize the potential of ethical AI technology, and they have entered licenses permitting the authorized use of their musical compositions in connection with AI.
“It remains crucial, however, that AI development occurs responsibly and on terms that are agreeable to rightsholders and in a manner that protects their rights, livelihoods, and the creative industries as a whole. “Even the most revolutionary of technologies must develop within the bounds of the law, and Anthropic‘s Claude models are no different.”
Anthropic rejected the allegations and told Fortune it would “defend ourselves robustly” in court. A spokesperson added, “This is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts.” Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG and Round Hill Music have also brought copyright cases against Anthropic.
