TLDR
- Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in a Northern California federal court on Friday
- The publishers accuse Anthropic of illegally scraping and downloading copyrighted songs to train its Claude AI models
- Named songs include “Eye of the Tiger,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings”
- The companies are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed song in statutory damages
- Anthropic denied the claims, saying it will “defend ourselves robustly in court”
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, alleging it used thousands of copyrighted songs without permission to train its AI models.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann.
They allege Claude was trained on tens of thousands of copyrighted songs obtained through torrenting and scraping.
They’re seeking up to $150K per work. https://t.co/1Js7i8MRgB pic.twitter.com/1Vx8SICnb0
— Wall St Engine (@wallstengine) August 29, 2026
The lawsuit was filed Friday in a Northern California federal court. Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann were named in the filing alongside the company.
The Copyright Claims
The publishers say Anthropic ran a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale.” The complaint lists well-known songs including “Eye of the Tiger,” Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.”
The lawsuit also names songs like “Livin’ On a Prayer,” “September,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “Ramblin’ Man,” and “Hallelujah.”
The publishers say Anthropic sourced some of this material through two pirate digital archives: Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. These archives contained books that included song lyrics and sheet music.
This connects to a June 2025 court ruling that found Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million pirated books from those same sites. A judge later ruled the use of copyrighted books for training was fair use, but Anthropic paid over $1.5 billion to settle a separate class-action lawsuit from authors over pirated works.
What the Publishers Want
Sony and Warner Chappell argue that Claude can reproduce copyrighted lyrics in its responses to users. They say this could allow the AI to replace licensed lyric services and undermine the market for human-created music.
The companies are seeking a jury trial and statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each composition Anthropic allegedly used.
Anthropic pushed back on the allegations. “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court,” a company spokesperson said.
This is not Anthropic’s first run-in with music copyright issues. A 2023 lawsuit from Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO resulted in court-approved rules requiring Anthropic to stop Claude from reproducing copyrighted lyrics in its responses.
Sony Music Publishing is part of Sony Group Corp. Warner Chappell is a unit of Warner Music Group.
Anthropic recently reported preliminary second-quarter revenue of more than $11.5 billion, up over 14 times from the same period last year. The company also posted its first positive adjusted operating income ahead of a possible IPO.
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