Sony, Warner sue Anthropic over song lyrics

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music, and a group of affiliated publishers filed suit against Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann in federal court in Northern California late on August 28. The complaint accuses Anthropic of torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted songs at scale to build and profit from the Claude model family:

“One of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”

The suit is broader than earlier music-industry claims against the company. It alleges Anthropic trained on tens of thousands of the publishers’ copyrighted compositions, not the narrower set of works cited in prior actions, and seeks statutory damages that scale into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per infringed work.

Why this one is different

Music publishers have sued AI companies before, including a $1 billion suit Round Hill Music brought against Suno and Anthropic in mid-August over song lyrics, and the tactic is not limited to music: publishers sued Google in July over training Gemini on copyrighted books. This complaint adds two of the biggest names in music publishing to the list of plaintiffs going after the same company, and it leans specifically on piracy and torrenting allegations rather than disputing fair use of publicly available text. It also lands days after a court ruled the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic was unlawful, a reminder that the company is fighting on several legal fronts at once. For any company building on licensed or scraped creative works, the message from rights holders is consistent: provenance of training data is now a first-order legal risk, not a footnote, and courts are increasingly willing to let these cases proceed to trial rather than dismiss them early.