Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic in a Northern California federal court, alleging the artificial intelligence company ran a brazen campaign
of mass copyright infringement to train its Claude models. The multi-billion-dollar lawsuit accuses the AI lab of piracy, scraping song lyrics, and removing copyright data.
A Multi-Billion-Dollar Copyright Challenge in California
The legal pressure on Anthropic intensified significantly as the publishing arms of the world’s major music companies joined forces to file a sweeping lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Filed late Friday, the complaint names not only the AI company as an corporate entity but also targets co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann individually. The plaintiffs describe the alleged conduct as one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.
According to the filing, Anthropic harvested thousands upon thousands
of copyrighted musical compositions without authorization to fuel the development and operation of its Claude series of artificial intelligence models. Among the specific works cited in the complaint are classic anthems and contemporary hits such as 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,
alongside Eye of the Tiger,
Great Balls of Fire,
and Ramblin’ Man.
From BitTorrent Archives to Destructive Book Scanning
The publishers’ complaint builds heavily upon factual findings established in Bartz v. Anthropic, a landmark class-action lawsuit brought by authors that concluded when Anthropic agreed to pay over $1.5 billion in September 2025. In that earlier case, a federal judge ruled that while training AI models on books could be permissible, acquiring millions of volumes through piracy was illegal.
The new music industry filing alleges that co-founder Benjamin Mann used the BitTorrent protocol in June 2021 to download at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis (LibGen), and that company employees torrented at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022. The lawsuit points out that because BitTorrent networks simultaneously upload pieces of files to other users while downloading, each transaction constituted an independent violation of the publishers’ exclusive distribution rights.
“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 in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ series of artificial intelligence (‘AI’) models.”
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, via Business Insider
Beyond torrenting digital archives, the complaint alleges that Anthropic ran a destructive scanning
operation on second-hand physical books, digitizing them before destroying the physical copies.
Scraped Lyrics, Stripped Metadata, and Market Competition
The lawsuit outlines multiple vectors of alleged infringement, extending from bulk book ingestion to direct lyric extraction. The publishers state that Anthropic scraped lyrics from licensed sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind—platforms that pay financial licensing fees to music publishers. Furthermore, the complaint asserts that when Anthropic engineers compiled their training sets, they used extraction tools to strip away copyright notices, owner names, and identifying metadata while leaving the expressive text intact.
This data stripping, according to the lawsuit, allows Claude models to memorize lyrics and reproduce them verbatim or near-verbatim when prompted by users. The publishers argue that these outputs, along with the ability to generate new lyrics in the style of
protected songwriters, create direct market substitutes that compete with human-made compositions and dilute the streaming royalty pools that sustain songwriters and publishers.
Statutory Damages and the Growing Legal Front
Because the complaint identifies tens of thousands of affected compositions, potential damages could reach billions of dollars if the court finds in the publishers’ favor.
The legal offensive against Anthropic spans multiple actions across the music industry. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO filed an initial lawsuit in Nashville in October 2023, which was subsequently transferred to California. Those same publishers brought a second suit covering over 20,000 works, while BMG filed a third case in March 2026, and Round Hill Music filed a fourth in August 2026. With Sony and Warner filing their joint action, every major music publishing entity is now actively litigating against the artificial intelligence developer.
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