Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and other music publishers sued Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann on August 28, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. [1, 2, 3] They accused Anthropic of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading thousands of copyrighted musical works without permission to train its Claude artificial intelligence models. [4, 1, 2, 5, 3]
The complaint calls the case "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history," alleging Anthropic acquired millions of copyright-protected materials including books with lyrics and sheet music through BitTorrent and Pirate Library Mirror. [4, 1, 2, 5, 3] Among the songs named as included in Anthropic's training data were "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, "Livin' On a Prayer" by Bon Jovi, "September" by Earth, Wind & Fire, "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen, and "Paper Rings" by Taylor Swift. [4]
Sony Music and Warner Chappell are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work plus $25,000 for each removal of copyright management information. If maximum damages are awarded, the total could reach billions of dollars. [4, 5] The plaintiffs stated, "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." [2]
This lawsuit follows a September 2025 settlement when Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors and publishers over previous copyright infringement claims related to training its AI models. [4, 1, 2, 5, 3] At that time, Anthropic acknowledged downloading over 7 million pirated books from unauthorized sources. [4, 1]
The case will proceed in the Northern District of California as Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell seek compensation and legal remedy for what they describe as systematic intellectual property theft involving thousands of musical compositions.
