Sony Music, Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over Claude AI training

Sony Music, Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over Claude AI training

Mon, August 31, 2026 at 5:32 PM GMT+3 2 min read

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed suit against Anthropic in California federal court last Friday, alleging that the AI company pirated copyrighted songs to train its Claude models. Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann were named as defendants alongside the company.

According to Axios, the complaint charges that Anthropic trained its models on "tens of thousands" of the publishers' copyrighted compositions without permission. The 48-page complaint describes the conduct as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." Songs cited in the lawsuit include Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You," Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings," Marvin Gaye's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," and the 1980s rock anthem "Eye of the Tiger."

The complaint accuses Anthropic of obtaining copyrighted works through digital piracy archives, including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Among the material allegedly downloaded from those sites were books containing lyrics and sheet music for songs such as "Livin' On a Prayer," "Hallelujah," and "Great Balls of Fire." The publishers contend that training Claude on these works allows it to reproduce near-identical copies of the compositions and generate AI lyrics that compete with human-made songs.

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell are seeking a jury trial and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed composition. As Axios notes, statutory damages are particularly potent here because plaintiffs pursuing individually copyrighted commercial recordings need not demonstrate actual financial harm to recover them.

Anthropic denied the allegations. "We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court," the company said in a statement.

This is not Anthropic's first copyright dispute. In September 2025, Anthropic resolved a class-action suit filed by authors over pirated training data, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion following a judicial finding that although incorporating copyrighted works into AI training did not itself violate the law, obtaining those works through piracy did. A separate lawsuit from BMG against Anthropic claims infringement against 493 compositions.

According to TechCrunch, the Sony and Warner Chappell complaint is wider-ranging than its predecessors and draws directly on evidence and arguments developed in the earlier litigation.