Overview
- Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Friday, Aug. 29, naming Anthropic and co‑founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants.
- The complaint accuses Anthropic of a “brazen campaign” of illegally torrenting, scraping licensed lyric services, and downloading copyrighted material to train its Claude models and lists specific songs it says appear in the training data.
- Plaintiffs seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each allegedly infringed work and up to $25,000 for each instance where copyright metadata was removed, a demand that could total billions if the court awards maximum amounts.
- The suit relies on disclosures from earlier litigation, including a September 2025 $1.5 billion settlement over allegedly pirated books, and alleges that torrenting from pirate archives and scraping services like MusixMatch and LyricFind supplied lyric content.
- Anthropic had not offered a substantive public response in initial reports and the case is likely to be lengthy because it could set legal limits on how AI developers may acquire and use copyrighted music and lyrics.