Anthropic faces $150,000-per-song damages in Sony, Warner copyright suit

Sony and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic on Friday, alleging "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic on Friday, seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work across "tens of thousands" of compositions allegedly used to train the Claude AI models without authorization.

"Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale," the publishers said in the complaint filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The complaint names Amodei and Mann as individual defendants, alleging Mann used BitTorrent in June 2021 to download at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis, while Anthropic employees torrented at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022. The publishers also allege Anthropic scraped lyrics from licensed platforms MusixMatch and LyricFind and used datasets including Common Crawl, The Pile, and Books3.

The lawsuit is the fifth major copyright case against Anthropic, following a $1.5 billion settlement with book authors in September 2025 and suits from Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music. With statutory damages capped at $150,000 per work and $25,000 per removal of copyright management information, the publishers' theoretical exposure runs into the billions — a risk Anthropic, valued at roughly $2 trillion ahead of a projected October IPO, has so far absorbed as a cost of doing business.

The Torrenting Trail

The complaint draws heavily on findings from Bartz v. Anthropic, the authors' case in which a judge in the same district described Anthropic's conduct as "straightforward piracy but at massive scale." Internal Anthropic material unsealed in that case shows Mann describing LibGen as "sketchy AF," while the company's own Archive Team called the site a "blatant violation of copyright." A 2024 Anthropic planning document quoted in the filing reads: "We don't want it to be known that we are working on this."

The publishers identify songs including Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Bon Jovi's "Livin' On a Prayer," Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You," Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings" as among the works found in Claude's training data. The publishers further allege that Claude reproduces their lyrics verbatim in outputs, and that guardrails added after earlier litigation from UMG, Concord, and ABKCO are "easily circumventable by simply 're-prompting' the model."

Escalating Legal Exposure

The suit brings four counts: direct infringement by torrenting against all three defendants, contributory infringement by torrenting against Amodei and Mann, and direct infringement plus removal of copyright management information against Anthropic alone. The publishers are demanding a jury trial, destruction of all infringing copies, and a full accounting of Claude's training data. They are represented by Oppenheim + Zebrak LLP, lead counsel for the UMG/Concord case, and Pryor Cashman LLP.

This is the fifth copyright case against Anthropic. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO sued in October 2023 over roughly 500 songs, then filed a second suit in January 2026 covering more than 20,000 works and seeking over $3 billion. BMG brought a third case in March over 493 compositions, and Round Hill Music filed a fourth on August 17.

The publishers argue that Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with book authors has not deterred the company. "Anthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright theft," the complaint states. "And $1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation."

The case adds to mounting legal pressure on AI companies over training data practices. Anthropic, which has branded itself the "ethical AI company," faces a growing web of litigation that could force it to negotiate licensing agreements with rightsholders or restructure how it sources training data. For music publishers, the suits represent a potential new revenue stream and bargaining power in ongoing negotiations over AI compensation. The outcome could set precedent for how AI companies across the industry source training data, with implications for OpenAI, Google, and Meta, all of which face similar copyright challenges. Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.