Sony Music and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic, Seeking Up to $150,000 Per Song Over Claude Training Data

Since Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO first sued Anthropic in October 2023 over roughly 500 songs, the legal assault on the AI company's training practices has grown into a full-blown industry pile-on. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music joined that fight on Friday, August 28, filing a 48-page complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that names Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and cofounder Benjamin Mann as defendants.

The complaint, obtained and first reported by Music Business Worldwide, accuses Anthropic of "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."

Sony and Warner Chappell say tens of thousands of their copyrighted musical compositions ended up in Claude's training data. Named songs include 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," and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings."

What the publishers allege

The suit brings four counts. Count one alleges direct copyright infringement through BitTorrent, against Anthropic, Amodei, and Mann jointly. Count two hits Amodei and Mann personally with contributory infringement, claiming they directed or approved the torrenting. Counts three and four target Anthropic alone: direct infringement through scraping, downloading, "destructive scanning," and model training and outputs, plus removing or altering copyright management information such as songwriter credits and copyright notices.

According to the complaint, Mann personally used BitTorrent in June 2021 to download at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis, and Anthropic employees torrented at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022. The publishers argue those book hauls included songbooks and sheet-music collections containing their lyrics, and that Amodei authorized the downloads.

Beyond torrenting, the publishers claim Anthropic scraped lyrics directly from licensed sites MusixMatch and LyricFind, sites that pay to license content from the labels, in violation of those sites' terms. They also allege Anthropic ran a "destructive scanning" operation, digitizing secondhand physical books and destroying them in the process, and pulled from datasets including Common Crawl, The Pile, and Books3.

Sony and Warner Chappell are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work willfully infringed, plus up to $25,000 for each instance of stripped copyright management information. Spread across "tens of thousands" of alleged compositions, per Music Business Worldwide's review of the filing, the total exposure could run into the billions. The publishers are demanding a jury trial, destruction of infringing copies, and a full accounting of Claude's training data. They're represented by Oppenheim + Zebrak, LLP, the same firm leading the Concord/UMG case, and by Pryor Cashman LLP.

Where this fits in the broader litigation

This is now the fifth music-publisher lawsuit against Anthropic. UMG, Concord, and ABKCO filed a second, larger suit in January 2026 covering more than 20,000 works and seeking over $3 billion. BMG sued in March 2026 over 493 compositions. Round Hill Music filed on August 17, 2026. With Sony and Warner Chappell now in the mix, the publishing arms of all three major music companies are litigating against Anthropic simultaneously.

Naming Amodei and Mann as individual defendants is the sharpest edge of the new filing, and it's a departure from the standard playbook of just suing the corporation. Anthropic's lawyers have already pushed back on that tactic once: in the related book-piracy litigation, they moved to drop the direct infringement claim against Amodei specifically, arguing he shouldn't be personally liable for company-wide decisions. Expect a similar fight here.

Anthropic's position, and the fair-use wrinkle

Anthropic has not filed a public response to this specific complaint, but a spokesperson said the company disagrees with the publishers' allegations and will "vigorously defend ourselves in court." Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment from The Verge or Engadget as of their publication.

In the related Bartz v. Anthropic case, a federal judge ruled last year that training an AI model on copyrighted books can itself be lawful, but that acquiring those books through piracy is not. That ruling produced the $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic paid authors and publishers in September 2025. Anthropic's defense in this new case will almost certainly lean on that same split: the argument that using copyrighted lyrics to train a model isn't automatically illegal, and that the real dispute is over how the data was obtained, not whether AI companies can train on creative work at all. Whether that distinction holds up when applied to song lyrics scraped from licensed platforms like MusixMatch is now a question for a California jury or judge to decide.

No trial date has been set. The case now joins at least four other active publisher suits against Anthropic working through the same California courts, with the Round Hill Music complaint from August 17 still in its earliest stages and the UMG/Concord case furthest along.