Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging copyright infringement

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Anthropic on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing the AI company of 'one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history' for using copyrighted songs to train its Claude AI models. The publishers seek $150,000 per work and $25,000 per copyright violation, potentially totaling billions, and also named Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and cofounder Benjamin Mann in the suit.

Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging copyright infringement Music giants Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have just filed a potentially multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Anthropic, https://mashable.com/category/anthropic and the publishers aren't mincing words. The lawsuit https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/files/2026/08/COMPLAINT-in-Sony Music Publishing US LLC e.pdf , filed Friday evening in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, calls Anthropic "the culprits behind one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." Sony and Warner also named Anthropic CEO and cofounder Dario Amodei and cofounder Benjamin Mann in the lawsuit. Play our Big Guessing Game: Make your predictions now for a chance to win a new Apple Watch. https://mashable.com/tech/big-guessing-game-apple-edition-round-3 Time's running out In the lawsuit, first reported by Music Business Worldwide https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/now-sony-music-publishing-and-warner-chappell-sue-anthropic-in-multi-billion-dollar-lawsuit-one-of-the-largest-and-most-blatant-ongoing-thefts-of-intellectual-property-in-history/ , the music companies claim that Anthropic has carried out "a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale" to train its popular Claude AI models. Sony and Warner accused Anthropic of having "reaped enormous profits" from the stolen music. Terms of Use https://www.ziffdavis.com/terms-of-use and Privacy Policy https://www.ziffdavis.com/ztg-privacy-policy . You May Also Like Sony and Warner are seeking $150,000 in damages per work as well as $25,000 per copyright violation. The music companies, which are the second- and third-largest in the industry, allege that thousands of titles have been stolen, putting compensation in the range of billions of dollars. The publishers have specifically accused Anthropic of "blatant theft" of song titles such as "Ain’t No Mountain High Enough," "All I Want for Christmas is You," "Eye of the Tiger," and "Here Comes Santa Claus." Anthropic has been hit with intellectual property lawsuits before. In fact, Sony and Warner's lawsuit directly references the $1.5 billion settlement https://mashable.com/tech/judge-approves-1-5-billion-anthropic-copyright-settlement that Anthropic reached with book publishers earlier this year in a similar case where the AI company was accused of training models on stolen works. The world's largest music company, Universal Music Group UMG , previously filed https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/umg-concord-and-abkco-sue-anthropic-for-3bn-in-what-could-be-single-largest-non-class-action-copyright-case-in-us-history/ copyright infringement lawsuits against Anthropic. UMG, along with Concord Music Group and ABKCO Music, filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in 2023 and again earlier this year. Their latest suit seeks more than $3 billion in damages.