Sony Music and Warner Sue Anthropic Over AI Training Copyright

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Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and numerous other music publishers filed suit against Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann on August 29, 2026, accusing the AI lab of conducting a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works” to train its Claude models. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and first reported by Music Business Worldwide.

The publishers accuse Anthropic of “blatant theft” and “flagrant piracy,” alleging the company used illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books - including works containing lyrics and sheet music. Some of the same lawyers behind the suit also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a separate case filed in January.

The new complaint builds on earlier litigation, most notably the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which a group of authors accused Anthropic of using copyrighted works to train its products. Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in that case after a judge ruled that while using copyrighted works for training was legal, acquiring that content through piracy was not. Anthropic had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.

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