Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic, alleging the artificial intelligence company engaged in a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale" to train its Claude AI models. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims Anthropic has committed "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history". The publishers are seeking damages that could total billions of dollars, with claims of up to $150,000 per infringed work and $25,000 for each instance of copyright management information removal.
The complaint names Anthropic and its co-founders, CEO Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, as defendants. According to the lawsuit, Anthropic unlawfully acquired and systematically copied musical compositions, including their lyrics and sheet music, to use as input for training its AI models and in the outputs those models generate. Specific songs cited in the legal filing include "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "All I Want for Christmas is You," "Eye of the Tiger," and "Paper Rings". The publishers contend that Anthropic's actions were a deliberate choice to avoid paying licensing fees for the use of copyrighted material in AI development.
This legal action follows similar lawsuits filed by other major music companies. Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO Music previously sued Anthropic in October 2023 and again in January 2026, seeking over $3 billion in damages. BMG and Round Hill Music have also filed separate copyright infringement suits against the AI developer. The current lawsuit references a previous $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic reached with book publishers in September 2025 over similar allegations of using pirated works for AI training. The publishers argue that this settlement indicates Anthropic views such legal costs as merely the "cost of doing business".
The lawsuit further alleges that Anthropic's Claude models can reproduce copyrighted lyrics verbatim in response to user prompts. This capability, the publishers claim, could allow users to obtain song lyrics directly from the AI chatbot, thereby undermining the market for licensed lyric services and impacting songwriters and music publishers. The publishers are demanding that Anthropic destroy all infringing copies of the works and provide an accounting of Claude's training data.
Anthropic has denied the accusations, stating, "We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court". The case adds to a growing number of legal challenges facing AI developers regarding the acquisition and use of training data, raising broader questions about the technology industry's practices and their compliance with intellectual property rights.