The lawsuit is similar to, and specifically references, another copyright case that Anthropic previously settled for $1.5 billion in August 2025. #
Some of the largest music publishers in the world are suing Anthropic, saying the company violated copyright laws in training its Claude AI models.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music describe Anthropic's activities as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."
According to the lawsuit, Anthropic used illegal websites to download material and conducted data scraping, in essence stealing copyrighted material.
"Anthropic has benefited immensely from exploiting the copyrighted works of Music Publishers and others in connection with its AI models," the lawsuit states. "At present, Anthropic is regarded as the most valuable AI start-up company in the world, valued at $965 billion."
In a statement to Axios, Anthropic said: "We disagree with the publishers' claims, and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court."
The lawsuit is similar to, and specifically references, another copyright case that Anthropic previously settled for $1.5 billion in August 2025.
In that case, authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued Anthropic on the grounds that the company had downloaded and used millions of copyrighted books from sites like Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) without permission, Authors Guild reported.
Similarly, the music publishers allege in their lawsuit that Anthropic used illegal sites to pirate copyrighted material.
"Anthropic collects and stockpiles its harvested data into a vast central 'library' that it maintains and exploits for a range of commercial and research purposes, including but not limited to training Claude models," the lawsuit states. "Anthropic compiled this central library by copying and ingesting text from a variety of sources (many of them well-known to be illegal) and via a range of methods, including by using BitTorrent to download and copy text from illegal pirate websites."
The music publishers seek monetary damages, attorney's fees, an accounting of how Anthropic's AI models were trained and how the material was used, and the destruction and removal of all copyrighted material in Anthropic's possession.
"Anthropic could immediately stop infringing Music Publishers' musical compositions and remove all of Music Publishers' lyrics from its training data and central library. Anthropic refuses to do so in order to grow Anthropic's business and reap enormous financial gains from the uncompensated labor of Music Publishers and their songwriters," the lawsuit states.
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