Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over Claude lyric training

What happened

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music and affiliated publishers sued Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann on 28 August 2026 in the Northern District of California, alleging tens of thousands of copyrighted musical compositions were copied to train the Claude models. The publishers describe the conduct as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."

What the complaint alleges

The 48-page complaint alleges Anthropic torrented at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis in June 2021 and at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022, scraped lyrics from licensed lyric websites, ran a "destructive scanning" operation digitizing second-hand physical books, and drew on datasets including Common Crawl, The Pile and Books3. It alleges Claude memorized lyrics during training and can reproduce them verbatim or near-verbatim, and that Anthropic stripped copyright management information.

What the publishers ask for

The publishers seek a jury trial, statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work and up to $25,000 per copyright-management-information violation, destruction of infringing copies under court supervision, and an accounting of Claude's training data and methods. Anthropic disputes the claims and says it intends to defend itself. The allegations have not been proven in court.