Sony Music and Warner sue Anthropic for intellectual property theft

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have moved to sue Anthropic, the home of AI model Claude, for intellectual property theft.

The complaint, filed on August 28th, names Anthropic co-founder and chief executive officer Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants.

The suit alleges that Anthropic 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".

Sony and Warner have deemed Anthropic's conduct "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history". The team is seeking damages for "tens of thousands" of copyrighted works, asking for up to $150,000 per work, as well as $25,000 for each instance when identifiable copyright data was stripped.

In total, the intended damages could amount to several billion dollars should the court rule in favour of Sony and Warner's case.

Anthropic has denied the claims brought against it, writing in a short statement, "We disagree with the publishers' claims, and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court."

Specific songs named in this suit include Bon Jovi's 'Livin' on a Prayer', Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough', Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' and Taylor Swift's 'Paper Rings'.

However, Anthropic has also faced multiple lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKBO, as well as separate suits from BMG and Round Hill Music, all in the same area.

Notably, in June 2025, a court found that Anthropic had downloaded over seven million pirated books to train its AI models. As a result, the company was ordered to pay a staggering $1.5billion.

In other AI news, Australia recently moved to ban all AI-generated music from its charts after Josh Fawaz's cover of the classic Madonna hit, 'Like a Prayer', became the most-played song on Australian radio, reaching number four on two ARIA charts last month.