Sony and Warner Music Sue Anthropic Over AI Training Data

By Enrique Cheang, E.C.V. & Asociados

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, joined by a group of other music publishers, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on the night of August 28, 2026.

The complaint names Anthropic itself as a defendant along with the company's chief executive, Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The 48-page filing accuses the company of what the plaintiffs describe as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history," alleging that Anthropic obtained copyrighted song lyrics and musical compositions through illegal torrenting, scraping, and downloading in order to train its Claude family of AI models.

According to the complaint, the alleged infringement covers tens of thousands of copyrighted compositions, a scope the publishers say is broader than comparable lawsuits filed by other rights holders against the company. The filing includes four separate causes of action: direct copyright infringement through torrenting against all defendants, contributory infringement through torrenting against Amodei and Mann individually, direct copyright infringement against Anthropic, and removal or alteration of copyright management information against Anthropic. The plaintiffs are seeking a jury trial and are asking for statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work, plus an additional $25,000 for each instance in which copyright management information was allegedly stripped from a work.

The lawsuit specifically references material tied to artists including The Beatles, Taylor Swift, and Michael Jackson, among hundreds of others whose compositions are represented by the plaintiff publishers. In their filing, the publishers argue that Anthropic's business model has treated copyright infringement as an operating cost rather than a legal risk, pointing to the company's roughly $2 trillion valuation as evidence that the alleged infringement has translated directly into commercial value. Anthropic responded to the filing with a public statement saying it disagreed with the publishers' claims and intended to defend itself in court.

This is not the first copyright dispute Anthropic has faced over its training data. In September 2025, the company agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with a group of authors and publishers, which was described at the time as the largest copyright settlement in United States history. Universal Music Group has separately pursued litigation against Anthropic dating back to 2023 over the alleged use of copyrighted song lyrics in model training, and that case remains ongoing. German music company BMG has also filed a narrower infringement suit against Anthropic, covering 493 specific compositions, a scale the new Sony and Warner complaint significantly exceeds in terms of the number of works at issue.

The case adds to a broader wave of litigation against major AI developers brought by authors, news publishers, music labels, and other copyright holders over how large language models are trained. Because a single commercially released song can carry separate copyrights for its lyrics, its underlying composition, and its sound recording, often held by different combinations of songwriters, publishers, and record labels, music industry lawsuits of this kind can expose an AI company to multiple, overlapping infringement claims tied to the very same work. The dispute is expected to unfold over an extended period, given the scale of the alleged infringement and the number of individual works the publishers say are involved.