Sony Music and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over a ‘Brazen Campaign’ of Alleged Piracy

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and a group of other major music publishers sued Anthropic late Friday night, accusing the AI lab and two of its co-founders of running what the complaint calls “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and was first reported by Music Business Worldwide, according to TechCrunch, The Verge, and Axios. The complaint names Anthropic as a corporate defendant alongside co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann individually.

What the 48-page complaint alleges

The publishers accuse Anthropic of conducting “a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ series of artificial intelligence (‘AI’) models,” according to the filing text quoted by The Verge and independently confirmed by Axios’s own read of the 48-page complaint.

“Plaintiff Music Publishers, a group of the world’s leading music publishers, bring this action to hold accountable the culprits behind one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”

Specifically, the suit alleges that Mann personally used BitTorrent to download more than five million pirated books, and that other Anthropic employees downloaded at least two million more from the shadow library Pirate Library Mirror. The publishers argue that because many of those pirated books contain song lyrics and sheet music, the same conduct now exposes Anthropic to music-copyright claims. Separately, the complaint alleges Anthropic scraped lyrics directly from licensed lyric sites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind, services that pay the labels for the right to host that content. The filing names specific tracks it says turned up in Anthropic’s training data, including Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” Earth, Wind and Fire’s “September,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.”

A broader claim than earlier music suits against Anthropic

Anthropic already faces a separate copyright suit from Universal Music Group and Concord, filed in January by some of the same lawyers who represent Sony and Warner in this new case and who led the Bartz v. Anthropic case, as well as further suits from ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music. Axios reports that BMG’s suit names 493 specific compositions. The new complaint is deliberately broader: it alleges Anthropic unlawfully trained on “tens of thousands” of copyrighted compositions rather than a narrow, enumerated list. Sony and Warner are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work infringed, plus up to $25,000 for each instance in which identifying copyright information was allegedly stripped from a work, a separate claim under federal copyright-management-information law. The Verge reports that if a court sided with the publishers on every claim, the total could reach several billion dollars.

A fresh suit follows Anthropic’s costliest copyright settlement yet

The new suit lands about six weeks after a federal judge in the same Northern California court, Araceli Martínez-Olguín, granted final approval to a separate, unrelated $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and a class of book authors and publishers, the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history. Anthropic originally agreed to that settlement in September 2025 to resolve Bartz v. Anthropic, a case over training Claude on pirated books obtained from shadow libraries; a judge had ruled that training an AI model on lawfully acquired copyrighted books could qualify as fair use, but that acquiring those books through piracy could not. The July 20, 2026 final approval covered roughly 500,000 pirated works at an average of about $3,000 each. That settlement resolved claims tied to Anthropic’s past acquisition of the disputed works; it did not shield the company from separate claims brought by other rights holders, such as the music publishers now suing over related scraping and torrenting conduct.

Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment from TechCrunch, The Verge, or Axios by the time each outlet published. Axios’s media reporter Sara Fischer noted that the music industry’s copyright system is structurally complicated, since a single song can carry separate copyrights for its lyrics, sound recording, and composition, split among different artists, publishers, and labels, which can expose AI companies to multiple lawsuits over the same song.