- Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic in federal court in California on August 28, accusing it of using tens of thousands of copyrighted song lyrics to train its Claude models without a license.
- The publishers seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each willfully infringed work, plus up to $25,000 for each removal of copyright management information, a structure that pushes the potential exposure into the billions.
- The suit lands weeks after Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement over pirated books, and widens the AI copyright fight from text into music.
Two of the largest music publishers in the world have taken Anthropic to court over the words inside its chatbot. On August 28, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed suit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing the AI company and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, of building Claude on a foundation of stolen lyrics.
What the publishers allege
Defendants have unlawfully acquired troves of Music Publishers' musical compositions, and then systematically copied those works multiple times, including as the inputs to train Anthropic's Claude AI models.Complaint, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music v. Anthropic, filed August 28, 2026
The complaint describes a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works." It says Anthropic pulled lyrics from licensed sites including MusixMatch and LyricFind, used BitTorrent to download pirated collections from Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror, and that Claude reproduces copyrighted lyrics close to verbatim when prompted, behind guardrails the publishers call "easily circumventable." Sony and Warner Chappell join an existing case brought by Universal Music Publishing, Concord, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music. Together they ask the court to order the destruction of infringing copies and to force Anthropic to disclose exactly what its models were trained on.
| Plaintiffs | Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, joining Universal, Concord, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill |
| Court | US District Court, Northern District of California, filed August 28, 2026 |
| Works at issue | tens of thousands of copyrighted compositions |
| Damages sought | up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work, up to $25,000 per removal of copyright management information |
| Relief | destruction of infringing copies and disclosure of Claude's training data |
Why it matters
This is the second major copyright reckoning for Anthropic in two months. In July the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors to settle claims that it trained on pirated books, in a case where the judge drew a sharp line. Training on copyrighted work could be lawful, the court found, but acquiring that work through piracy was not. The publishers are aiming straight at that line. Their filing leans less on whether AI training counts as fair use and more on how the material was obtained, the argument that has already cost Anthropic more than any other AI copyright case to date.
The music industry is not arguing that training AI on lyrics is always illegal. It is arguing that stealing the lyrics first is, and that argument has already cost Anthropic $1.5 billion once.
The publishers are not fighting alone. The recorded-music side of the industry has been battling AI companies since 2024, when the major labels sued the music generators Suno and Udio, and the publishing arm has now opened a second front against the chatbots. For Sony and Warner Chappell, whose catalogs hold the compositions behind much of modern pop, the wager is that early and aggressive litigation sets the licensing price for everything that follows.
Anthropic could not be reached for comment before the filing was reported, and has not yet responded in court. A response is expected in the coming weeks. For an industry that has spent two years insisting the open web is fair game, the lyrics suit is another test of whether "we trained on it" and "we were allowed to" are the same sentence.
Santage is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This article is produced in accordance with Santage's Editorial Standards and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Allegations described are drawn from the complaint and reporting at the time of writing and have not been tested in court. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.