Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic on August 28, 2026, accusing the company of a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading” song lyrics to train its Claude AI models. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, names Anthropic alongside co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants.
What the complaint alleges
According to the filing, Anthropic obtained tens of thousands of copyrighted musical compositions through BitTorrent downloads from pirated book repositories, by scraping lyrics from licensed sites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind, and by mining large training sets including Common Crawl and Books3. The publishers cite specific songs they say were used without permission, including “Eye of the Tiger,” “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.” The complaint also alleges Mann downloaded works from pirated sources “to avoid the trouble of paying for them.”
Sony and Warner are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work found to be willfully infringed, plus up to $25,000 for each instance in which copyright-management information was allegedly stripped from a work — a claims structure that could push total exposure into the billions of dollars given the scale of infringement alleged.
Anthropic said in a statement that it disagrees with the publishers’ claims and “intends to defend itself robustly in court.”
Part of a wider legal pattern
The copyright suit is the fourth major music-industry action against Anthropic this year, following earlier cases from Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music that together seek roughly $3 billion over some 20,000 songs. It also lands months after Anthropic settled a separate book-piracy case with authors for $1.5 billion — the largest copyright payout in U.S. history — after a judge ruled that training on copyrighted books could be lawful, but acquiring them through piracy was not. That distinction, between fair use of lawfully obtained material and piracy, remains central to how courts are weighing AI-training claims.