- Thirty-five music-publishing entities, including Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, sued Anthropic, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann in the Northern District of California on August 28, 2026. [1] - The complaint alleges Anthropic used BitTorrent, lyric websites, third-party datasets and scanned books to acquire or copy protected compositions, including works such as “Eye of the Tiger,” “September” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.” [2] - The publishers seek up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work, up to $25,000 per copyright-management-information violation, a training-data accounting, destruction of infringing copies and a permanent injunction.
[[3]](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/files/2026/08/COMPLAINT-in-Sony_Music_Publishing_US_LLC_e.pdf) - Anthropic said it disagrees with the claims and intends to defend itself in court.
[[4]](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/29/sony-music-warner-sue-anthropic-alleging-a-brazen-campaign-of-intellectual-property-theft/)
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music and affiliated publishers have sued Anthropic, accusing the Claude developer of building and operating its AI models with tens of thousands of copyrighted musical compositions obtained through piracy, scraping and other unauthorized copying. [1]
The complaint, filed August 28, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. It alleges that Claude has generated verbatim or near-verbatim song lyrics and that Anthropic’s conduct has damaged licensing markets for publishers and songwriters. [2]
Anthropic told TechCrunch: “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.” [4]
A broad complaint built around acquisition, training and output #
The 48-page complaint identifies 35 publishing entities as plaintiffs, including Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music and companies connected with the EMI and Hipgnosis catalogs. The docket classifies the case as a copyright action and records a jury demand. [1]
The publishers say Anthropic’s alleged conduct began with large-scale torrenting. They rely on findings from the separate Bartz v. Anthropic litigation, which concluded that Anthropic had torrented more than seven million pirated books from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The new complaint says those books included lyrics and sheet music for hundreds or more of the plaintiffs’ compositions. [2]
The filing also alleges that Anthropic scraped lyrics from websites including MusixMatch and LyricFind, copied material from Common Crawl, The Pile and Books3, and used a “destructive scanning” project that converted second-hand books into digital text before adding the material to a central library. Those allegations concern the claimed acquisition and copying of works; the complaint separately alleges that Anthropic used the material as training input and made further copies while encoding and fine-tuning Claude. [2]
The works named in the complaint include “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “All I Want for Christmas is You,” “Eye of the Tiger,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “Livin’ On a Prayer,” “September,” “Hallelujah,” “Uptown Funk” and “Paper Rings.” Exhibits A and B are described as non-exhaustive lists, so the publishers are not limiting their claims to only the works listed there. [2]
The claims reach beyond the training corpus #
The complaint asserts four theories: direct infringement through torrenting against Anthropic, Amodei and Mann; contributory infringement through torrenting against Amodei and Mann; direct infringement against Anthropic for its broader use of the compositions; and removal or alteration of copyright-management information against Anthropic. [5]
The publishers allege that Claude can reproduce protected lyrics in response to prompts, generate unauthorized derivatives and produce new lyrics that compete with licensed compositions. They also claim that Anthropic’s processing removed copyright notices and other identifying information from scraped text, leaving the model able to produce lyrics without appropriate attribution. [2]
The complaint does not state a single damages figure. Instead, it seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work that a jury finds was willfully infringed, or actual damages and defendants’ profits. For alleged removal or alteration of copyright-management information, it seeks up to $25,000 per violation under the cited statute. [3]
The requested non-monetary relief is extensive. The publishers want a permanent injunction against further infringement, an accounting of Anthropic’s training data, training methods and known model capabilities, plus destruction under court supervision of infringing copies in the defendants’ possession or control. [3]
A new music case follows Anthropic’s book settlement #
The lawsuit arrives shortly after a federal judge granted final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers in Bartz. That settlement resolved claims about Anthropic’s past acquisition and copying of works through August 25, 2025. [6]
The settlement did not release claims based on AI outputs, future conduct or works absent from the settlement’s works list. The Authors Guild said the court’s order preserved those claims, leaving room for later litigation involving what Claude produces or how Anthropic handles material after the settlement period. [6]
The underlying Bartz rulings drew a distinction between training on lawfully acquired books and acquiring books through pirate sites. TechCrunch reported that Judge William Alsup found the training use of copyrighted text to be fair use on the record before him, while finding Anthropic’s down and storage of pirated books unlawful. Because Anthropic settled, that ruling did not become binding appellate precedent. [7]
The Sony-Warner case puts music publishers’ compositions into that unresolved legal terrain while adding allegations about model outputs, market substitutes and copyright-management information. The filing says the publishers have entered AI licenses in other circumstances and argues that commercial model development must occur on terms acceptable to rightsholders. [2]
Companies mentioned #
Further sources #
[1] The federal docket identifies the plaintiffs, defendants, case number, filing d… ↗
[2] The filed complaint alleges mass torrenting, scraping, dataset use, scanning, t… ↗
[3] The complaint’s prayer for relief requests statutory damages, a training-data a… ↗ [4] TechCrunch reported Anthropic’s response: “We disagree with the publishers’ cla… ↗
[5] The complaint sets out the four causes of action, including direct and contribu… ↗
[6] The Authors Guild summarizes the July 20, 2026 final approval of the $1.5 billi… ↗+1 more The stories that matter, in one email. Free — unsubscribe anytime.