Overview
- Units of Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed a federal complaint Saturday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California naming Anthropic and co‑founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants.
- The 48‑page suit alleges a ‘‘brazen campaign’’ of illegal torrenting, scraping, and bulk downloading to obtain thousands of copyrighted musical works used to train Anthropic’s Claude models.
- Plaintiffs ask for statutory damages of hundreds of thousands of dollars per infringed work, a demand that could create billion‑dollar exposure if the courts award large sums.
- Anthropic had not offered a substantive public response to the filing and the case follows a related September 2025 settlement in which Anthropic paid $1.5 billion over how it obtained copyrighted training material.
- The publishers seek trials and legal rulings that could clarify whether AI firms must license content or can use scraped works, a decision that would reshape costs for AI companies and income for songwriters and publishers.