Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic and two of its co-founders on August 28, 2026, alleging that tens of hundreds of copyrighted musical compositions have been copied to coach the corporate’s Claude AI fashions. The criticism, filed within the US District Courtroom for the Northern District of California, names Chief Government Officer Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as particular person defendants alongside the corporate.
The plaintiffs, a bunch of publishing entities submitting collectively because the Music Publishers, describe the conduct at subject as “one of many largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of mental property in historical past.” Songs named within the submitting embody “Ain’t No Mountain Excessive Sufficient,” “All I Need for Christmas is You,” “Eye of the Tiger,” “Livin’ On a Prayer,” “September,” “Hallelujah,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.” The publishers are demanding a jury trial.
The 4 Counts
The criticism brings 4 claims. The primary alleges direct copyright infringement by torrenting towards all three defendants. The second prices Amodei and Mann personally with contributory infringement for steering and approving the torrenting exercise. The third and fourth counts, introduced towards Anthropic alone, allege direct infringement by scraping, downloading, harmful scanning, mannequin coaching, and AI outputs, plus elimination or alteration of copyright administration info, the figuring out knowledge reminiscent of music titles, songwriter names, and copyright notices that federal regulation protects.
In keeping with the criticism, Mann used the BitTorrent protocol in June 2021 to obtain at the very least 5 million pirated books from Library Genesis, referred to as LibGen, and Anthropic workers torrented at the very least two million extra from a successor web site referred to as Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022. The publishers allege these hauls included lots of of songbooks and sheet-music collections containing their compositions, and that Amodei expressly approved the downloads. As a result of BitTorrent customers add items of recordsdata to others whereas downloading, the criticism argues every torrent additionally violated the publishers’ unique proper of distribution.
Past torrenting, the publishers allege Anthropic scraped lyrics from licensed lyric web sites together with MusixMatch and LyricFind in violation of these websites’ phrases, ran a “harmful scanning” operation that digitized hundreds of thousands of second-hand bodily books earlier than destroying them, and drew on third-party datasets together with Frequent Crawl, The Pile, and Books3. The criticism states the publishers have by no means licensed Anthropic to make use of their works in any of those methods.
Coaching, Outputs, and Guardrails
The submitting describes how the allegedly unlicensed lyrics transfer by Anthropic’s growth course of. When Anthropic assembles a coaching corpus, the criticism says, engineers “clear” the textual content with extraction instruments that strip out copyright notices and proprietor names whereas leaving the expressive content material, a course of the publishers characterize as deliberate concealment. The criticism alleges Claude fashions then memorize lyrics throughout coaching and might reproduce them verbatim or near-verbatim in response to person prompts, in addition to generate derivatives “within the model of” represented songwriters.
The publishers acknowledge that Anthropic added guardrails meant to cease Claude from reproducing copyrighted textual content after earlier litigation, however allege these measures are simply circumvented by merely re-prompting the mannequin. The criticism additional argues that Claude’s means to jot down new lyrics creates market substitutes that compete with the publishers’ catalogs and dilute the streaming royalty swimming pools from which publishers and songwriters are paid.
Reliance on the Bartz Findings
A lot of the criticism’s factual basis comes from Bartz v. Anthropic, the authors’ class motion in the identical district, the place the courtroom discovered Anthropic had torrented hundreds of thousands of pirated books and described the conduct as “simple piracy however at large scale.” Anthropic settled that case in September 2025 for $1.5 billion. The brand new submitting quotes inner Anthropic materials unsealed in Bartz, together with Mann’s description of LibGen as “sketchy AF,” an Anthropic archive staff’s characterization of the location as a “blatant violation of copyright,” and a 2024 planning doc concerning the scanning operation stating, “We don’t need it to be recognized that we’re engaged on this.”
“Dr. Amodei and Mr. Mann are personally liable for his or her respective roles on this unlawful torrenting of pirated copies of Music Publishers’ works from LibGen and PiLiMi,” the criticism states.
Damages and Calls for
The publishers search statutory damages of as much as $150,000 per work infringed the place infringement is discovered willful, and as much as $25,000 per violation for elimination or alteration of copyright administration info. Additionally they ask the courtroom to order Anthropic to destroy all infringing copies of their works below courtroom supervision and to offer an accounting of its coaching knowledge, coaching strategies, and the particular lyrics and different copyrighted works used to coach its fashions.
The publishers state within the submitting that they acknowledge the potential of moral AI know-how and have entered licenses allowing approved makes use of of their compositions by different AI corporations. “Even essentially the most revolutionary of applied sciences should develop throughout the bounds of the regulation, and Anthropic’s Claude fashions aren’t any totally different,” the criticism reads. The publishers are represented by Oppenheim + Zebrak and Pryor Cashman. Anthropic had not publicly responded to the swimsuit as of its submitting date.
