Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic for Copyright Theft

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a federal lawsuit in Northern California against Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann, alleging what they call "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." The publishers say Anthropic illegally obtained tens of thousands of copyrighted musical compositions to train its Claude AI models.

The complaint lists four methods of alleged infringement: downloading copyrighted files via torrent from pirate libraries; scraping song lyrics from licensed platforms MusixMatch and LyricFind without permission; purchasing and destroying used songbooks and sheet music to digitize them; and generating synthetic training data from pirated content to obscure the copyright trail. The suit names Amodei personally, stating he "expressly directed, approved, controlled, and intentionally induced these infringements." Damages sought reach up to $150,000 per infringed work and up to $25,000 per violation for unlawful removal of copyright management information.

The lawsuit follows Anthropic's September 2025 settlement with book authors and publishers worth $1.5 billion. Music publishers are now pursuing the same legal theory: that AI labs cannot hide behind the argument that training data never appeared in a commercial product if that data was illegally acquired in the first place.