LLMs

Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic Over Music Used in AI Training

co-written by newsrooms.ai31. August 2026, 08:59

The music publishers Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have joined forces to take Anthropic to court. In a lawsuit that became public over the weekend, they accuse the AI company of acquiring musical compositions on a massive scale through illegal torrent networks and then systematically copying those works, among other things to train its Claude models. The complaint refers to “tens of thousands” of affected compositions, including globally known songs such as All I Want For Christmas Is You and Eye Of The Tiger.

The complaint, published by Music Business Worldwide, describes the case as “one of the largest and most brazen ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” Alongside the company itself, it names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants, arguing that they are personally liable for downloading pirated works via the platforms Libgen and Pilimi. A further count concerns the removal or alteration of copyright management information.

Damages Could Run Into the Billions

The two publishers are seeking up to 150,000 dollars for each willfully infringed work, plus up to 25,000 dollars for every alleged removal of copyright management information. On paper, that puts Anthropic’s potential exposure in the range of several billion dollars. The plaintiffs also demand the destruction of all infringing copies and a full accounting of the training data behind Claude.

Much of the argument rests on a case Anthropic settled about a year ago: the company paid 1.5 billion dollars to authors, roughly 3,000 dollars per work, to end a dispute over an estimated seven million books allegedly downloaded from piracy sites. It remains the largest copyright settlement on record, and the music publishers are now using it as a benchmark.

Anthropic Rejects the Allegations

The publishers also take aim at how the Claude maker presents itself in public, arguing that while Anthropic positions itself as an “ethical AI company,” it has repeatedly placed competitive advantage above compliance with the law. Anthropic disputes that account. In a statement to TechCrunch, the company said it disagrees with the publishers’ claims and intends to defend itself vigorously in court.

Anthropic has faced similar claims from the music industry before. Other major publishers, including Universal Music Publishing Group and BMG, have already filed suit against the company on comparable grounds. Together, these cases are shaping up as a test of how far AI developers may go in using copyrighted works to train their models.