Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over music copyright

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, along with several other music publishers, sued Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann on August 28, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging the AI lab ran a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works" to train Claude.

What's new

The complaint, filed late Friday and first reported by Music Business Worldwide, accuses Anthropic of unlawfully training its models on "tens of thousands" of music publishers' copyrighted compositions — a broader scope than earlier music-industry suits against the company. It also alleges Anthropic scraped authorized lyric repositories including MusixMatch and LyricFind rather than licensing that content.

The publishers are seeking a jury trial and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, plus $25,000 for each instance of alleged copyright-management-information removal — a structure that, given the scale of works claimed, could put total exposure in the billions of dollars.

Context

This is not Anthropic's first music-copyright fight, and it follows a much larger settlement in a different copyright dispute: in 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve a class-action suit from authors and publishers after a judge ruled that while training on copyrighted books was legal, acquiring those books through piracy was not — the same legal theory Sony and Warner Chappell are now applying to music. Other music publishers had already sued Anthropic earlier this year over a narrower set of allegedly pirated songs; this new suit significantly expands the claimed scope of infringing works.

Why it matters

The book-publishing settlement set a precedent that "how you acquired the training data" is a separate legal question from "whether training on it is fair use" — and it put a concrete number on what piracy-based claims can cost an AI lab. If Sony and Warner Chappell's suit follows a similar trajectory, Anthropic faces another multi-billion-dollar exposure question, this time over its music and lyric-related capabilities in Claude. It also signals that music publishers, who have largely watched the book-publishing settlement play out from the sidelines, are now moving aggressively to stake out their own claims before any industry-wide licensing norms get set by settlement or by court precedent.