Sony Music and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over Stolen Song Lyrics

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic on August 28 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing the AI company of using pirated song lyrics to train its Claude model. The suit, which names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants, seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work plus $25,000 for each stripped copyright management notice, potentially totaling billions. The publishers allege Anthropic scraped lyrics from licensed sites and used BitTorrent to download pirated books, with Mann personally accused of downloading at least five million books from Library Genesis in June 2021.

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have taken Anthropic into a new lyrics fight, and the case turns on a blunt question: did Claude learn from licensed works, or from pirated ones? The complaint landed on August 28 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. It names Anthropic along with co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants. That's unusual. According to Music Business Worldwide, which first reported the filing, the 48-page suit accuses Anthropic of "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." The publishers say Anthropic scraped lyrics from licensed sites including MusixMatch and LyricFind, on top of the millions of pirated books it had already pulled down through BitTorrent. Before feeding the lyrics into Claude's training data, the publishers allege, Anthropic stripped out song titles, songwriter credits and copyright notices, keeping only the words. Nothing subtle about it. Among the songs named in the complaint are Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Bon Jovi's "Livin' On a Prayer," Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings." You don't need to be a copyright lawyer to see why those examples were chosen. These are not obscure catalog works sitting quietly in the back of a database. That's where the numbers get big. Sony and Warner Chappell are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, plus another $25,000 for every instance where copyright management information was allegedly stripped out. That's real money, even by Silicon Valley standards. Spread across what the complaint calls tens of thousands of compositions, the total exposure could run into the billions. Naming Amodei and Mann personally, not just the company, is the sharper edge of this filing. The complaint alleges Mann used BitTorrent in June 2021 to download at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis, and that Anthropic employees torrented at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022. That's a personal exposure most executives never see. Going after individual executives raises the stakes for Anthropic's leadership directly, though the company has already pushed back on that tactic once. In a related case over alleged book piracy, Anthropic's lawyers moved to drop the direct infringement claim against Amodei specifically, arguing he shouldn't be personally on the hook for decisions made across the company. Anthropic's Dario Amodei Blames AI Backlash on a Crisis of Trust https://startupfortune.com/anthropics-dario-amodei-blames-ai-backlash-on-a-crisis-of-trust/ Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the AI industry's public backlash is "fundamentally a crisis of trust," pushing back on claims his own risk warnings are to blame. He admits AI firms haven't delivered on big promises like curing disease, even as lawsuits against rivals like xAI mount. - why people distrust AI companies right now https://startupfortune.com/anthropics-dario-amodei-blames-ai-backlash-on-a-crisis-of-trust/ - Anthropic CEO addresses artificial intelligence backlash crisis https://startupfortune.com/anthropics-dario-amodei-blames-ai-backlash-on-a-crisis-of-trust/ The music cases are piling up And it won't be the last. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO filed a second torrenting lawsuit against Anthropic in January 2026 covering more than 20,000 works and seeking over $3 billion. Anthropic has since sought partial dismissal in that case. BMG brought a narrower claim in March naming 493 specific compositions. Round Hill Music added another front on August 17, when it sued Anthropic in Northern California and filed a separate case against AI music company Suno the same day. Round Hill said each case could approach or exceed $1 billion. The Sony and Warner Chappell suit now puts the publishing arms of all three major music companies in litigation against the Claude maker, which tells you how seriously the industry is treating this fight. Music copyright is a messy business for a reason. A single song can carry separate protections for lyrics, melody and recording, split across different rights holders who each have standing to sue. That makes a lyrics case different from a fight over a scraped news article or a pirated novel. One song can pull several owners into the room. The Bartz line matters The timing tracks with Anthropic's other legal exposure. In July 2026, a federal judge gave final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers in the Bartz case, which the Association of American Publishers described as the largest class action copyright settlement in history. That case turned on one distinction: using legally acquired books to train an AI model counted as fair use in Judge William Alsup's ruling, but downloading pirated books to build a training library did not. Music publishers are betting the same line holds for lyrics. Anthropic hasn't commented publicly on the new Sony and Warner Chappell suit. Frankly, the pattern here isn't complicated. Nobody is arguing, in these cases, that training an AI on song lyrics is automatically illegal. The claim is about how the lyrics got onto Anthropic's servers in the first place. Courts have already drawn that line once, though only in a district court ruling. Sony and Warner Chappell are now asking for it to be drawn again, at a scale that could make the book settlement look small by comparison. Also read: Instinct's AI Assistant Grabbed User Data Rights, Then Raised $250 Million https://startupfortune.com/instincts-ai-assistant-grabbed-user-data-rights-then-raised-250-million/ • Musicians Are Turning Detective to Catch AI Acts Stealing Their Streams https://startupfortune.com/musicians-are-turning-detective-to-catch-ai-acts-stealing-their-streams/ • More Than 80 British Actors Demand UK Law Against AI Voice Cloning https://startupfortune.com/more-than-80-british-actors-demand-uk-law-against-ai-voice-cloning/ Anthropic's refusal to bend to Washington has cost it Pentagon contracts and earned it a court fight it did not expect https://startupfortune.com/anthropics-refusal-to-bend-to-washington-has-cost-it-pentagon-contracts-and-earned-it-a-court-fight-it-did-not-expect/ The Trump administration designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk, forced it to recall its Mythos AI model under export controls, and banned federal agencies from using its products. While OpenAI and Google secured federal contracts by playing the Washington access game, Anthropic's refusal to allow autonomous weapons use has... - why did Trump ban Anthropic https://startupfortune.com/anthropics-refusal-to-bend-to-washington-has-cost-it-pentagon-contracts-and-earned-it-a-court-fight-it-did-not-expect/ - Anthropic supply chain risk designation Pentagon https://startupfortune.com/anthropics-refusal-to-bend-to-washington-has-cost-it-pentagon-contracts-and-earned-it-a-court-fight-it-did-not-expect/