Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic for alleged large-scale copyright infringement in AI training

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, alongside other music publishers, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleging that Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann conducted a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works" to train the company’s AI model Claude.

The complaint asserts that Anthropic used thousands of copyrighted works—including those containing lyrics and sheet music—without authorization to train its models, describing the practice as "blatant theft."

This lawsuit follows prior intellectual property litigation against Anthropic. The same legal team represents Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a separate case filed in January, and previously led the Bartz v. Anthropic case in which authors accused Anthropic of using copyrighted works to train products like Claude.

In the Bartz case, a judge ruled it was legal for Anthropic to use copyrighted works for training but not legal to acquire that content through piracy; Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in that matter.

The publishers allege that Anthropic’s latest alleged misconduct is broader, accusing the company of "flagrant piracy" through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books containing copyrighted musical content.

Anthropic had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication, according to TechCrunch.