Sony, Warner Sue Anthropic Over Copyright Infringement

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a major lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Anthropic on August 28, 2026, accusing the firm of conducting a massive and deliberate campaign of copyright infringement to train its AI models. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Anthropic and its founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, engaged in "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."

The lawsuit claims Anthropic unlawfully acquired and used "tens of thousands" of copyrighted musical compositions to develop its Claude series of AI models. The publishers allege the company's methods included illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading works on a massive scale. Specifically, the complaint states that in June 2021, co-founder Benjamin Mann used BitTorrent to download at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis, and that Anthropic employees later torrented at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. The suit also accuses Anthropic of scraping lyrics from licensed websites like MusixMatch and LyricFind.