Reservoir Media sues Anthropic over 853 songs allegedly used to train Claude, seeking about $151M

What happened

On October 21, 2026, independent music publisher Reservoir Media sued Anthropic in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (case 5:26-cv-12308), alleging the lyrics of 853 compositions were copied and used to train Claude without permission and that Claude reproduces them in its responses. Songs named in the complaint include works associated with Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash and Madonna.

Claims and damages sought

Reservoir seeks up to $150,000 per work for copyright infringement ($127.95 million for 853 songs), plus $21.325 million for removing copyright management information and $2.1325 million for circumventing access controls, about $151.4 million in total. The complaint also alleges a training file called "youtube_music" holding more than 2 million clips scraped from YouTube, and seeks destruction of copies of its works, including copies retained in training datasets and model weights.

Response and status

Anthropic said it disagrees with the allegations and intends to defend the case vigorously. These are allegations in a complaint, not court findings. Reservoir filed a separate lawsuit against Suno the same day over 1,050 works; that case is a different defendant and is noted here only as context. The suit was filed two days before the Elvis Presley owners' suit against Anthropic, covered separately.