Sony Music, Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over copyright infringement

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic. | Image: Bloomberg

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic, accusing the AI company of carrying out large-scale scraping, torrenting, and downloading of copyrighted works to train its Claude AI models.

The lawsuit, filed in a Northern California federal court, also names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. Anthropic has disputed the allegations and said it intends to defend itself robustly in court, according to Business Insider.

What do Sony and Warner allege?

The publishers claim Anthropic obtained and used "tens of thousands" of copyrighted musical compositions without permission, including works associated with well-known songs such as Eye of the Tiger, September, Uptown Funk, Hallelujah, Taylor Swift's Paper Rings, and Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You.

The complaint alleges that Anthropic obtained copyrighted material through torrent networks and large-scale scraping, including material from digital archives such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. It also alleges that the company scraped lyrics from websites including Musixmatch and LyricFind.

The publishers further claim that Claude can reproduce copyrighted lyrics either verbatim or substantially as written, and they argue that such outputs could compete with music created by human songwriters.

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What damages are being sought?

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work they say was wilfully infringed, while they are also seeking up to $25,000 for each alleged removal or alteration of copyright management information.

The potential financial exposure could run into billions of dollars, although any final damages would depend on the court's findings. The publishers have also requested a jury trial and are seeking other remedies, including the destruction of infringing copies and an accounting of Claude's training data.

The stakes rise for Anthropic

The case comes shortly after Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers over allegations involving pirated books used to train Claude. A US judge had found that Anthropic downloaded more than seven million pirated books, although the earlier case also raised a distinction between using copyrighted material for AI training and illegally acquiring that material.

The music publishers are using that earlier litigation as part of their case, while arguing that AI companies must obtain copyrighted creative works lawfully and compensate rights holders where required.

Other recent copyright lawsuits against major AI companies

Anthropic is not alone in facing legal challenges over AI training data. Recent cases include:

• OpenAI: WikiHow sued OpenAI in August 2026, alleging that more than 11,000 instructional articles were scraped without permission to train ChatGPT

• Meta: Publishers including Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill sued Meta in May 2026, alleging that copyrighted books and journal articles were used to train its Llama models

• Google: Publishers and authors have also filed a class-action lawsuit accusing Google of using copyrighted works to train its Gemini AI platform

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