Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic Over AI Training Piracy
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a joint lawsuit against Anthropic on August 28 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The publishers claim the AI company ran a "brazen campaign" of torrenting, scraping, and bulk-downloading copyrighted songs to train its Claude models. With statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, the total exposure runs into the billions.
The claim
The complaint describes "thousands and thousands" of protected compositions taken without permission or payment. Sony and Warner say Anthropic didn't just use the music — it actively stripped copyright management information from files, an act that carries an additional $25,000 per violation under US law. The publishers called it one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history, per Music Business Worldwide.
A jury trial has been requested.
A pattern of lawsuits
This is the fourth major music industry action against Anthropic in under a year. Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group sued in January 2026 over more than 20,000 songs, seeking over $3 billion. BMG followed in March 2026 with a claim covering 493 compositions. Round Hill Music filed on August 17 — just eleven days before Sony and Warner. The same Anthropic founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, are named as defendants across the suits.
The timing is striking. That same week, a US court approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with a group of authors in a separate case. In that matter, Judge William Alsup had already ruled that building a permanent training library from pirated sources violates copyright — even if the AI's eventual output is considered transformative. That ruling has become a pivot point: it isn't the AI's use of the material that triggers liability, it's the piracy used to acquire it, as legal analysis from P4SC4L explains.
What it means
Music copyright is unusually fragmented. A single song can carry separate rights for its lyrics, its composition, and its sound recording — each held by different parties. That fragmentation multiplies the number of individual claims per track, which is why the dollar figures in these suits scale so quickly.
Anthropic has not issued a public statement in response to the Sony and Warner filing. The company faces an accumulating legal bill that, if these suits reach verdict rather than settlement, could total tens of billions of dollars across all pending cases.
