Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed the Sony Warner Chappell Anthropic lawsuit in the Northern District of California on Friday, accusing the AI company and two of its founders of torrenting, scraping, and using copyrighted songs on a mass scale to build the Claude series of artificial intelligence models.
The 48-page complaint, docketed as case 5:26-cv-09217, names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann alongside the company. The publishers are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each copyrighted composition used to train Claude, plus up to $25,000 for each alleged instance of removal or alteration of copyright management information, according to The Verge.
‘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,’ the complaint states.
Anthropic denied the accusations. ‘We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court,’ the company said in a statement.
What the Sony Warner Chappell Anthropic lawsuit alleges
The complaint brings four distinct counts: direct infringement by torrenting against all three defendants; contributory infringement by torrenting against Amodei and Mann personally; direct infringement through scraping, training, and model outputs against Anthropic alone; and removal or alteration of copyright management information against Anthropic alone, as reported by Music Business Worldwide.
The filing is particularly pointed about Mann’s personal conduct. According to The Verge, the complaint alleges Mann personally used BitTorrent to download more than five million pirated books from Library Genesis, while other Anthropic employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. The filing also cites internal Anthropic material, unsealed in prior litigation, in which Mann described LibGen as ‘sketchy AF,’ and notes that Anthropic’s own Archive Team had called LibGen a ‘blatant violation of copyright.’
Beyond pirate archives, the publishers allege that Anthropic scraped lyrics from licensed platforms including MusixMatch and LyricFind (services that had paid to licence content from the labels) as well as from datasets including Common Crawl. Scraping and distributing MusixMatch content violates the site’s user agreement, and LyricFind’s policy similarly prohibits reproduction, according to Fortune.
Songs named in the complaint include ‘Eye of the Tiger,’ Marvin Gaye’s ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,’ Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas is You,’ Taylor Swift’s ‘Paper Rings,’ ‘Livin’ On a Prayer,’ ‘September,’ ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ ‘Ramblin’ Man,’ and ‘Hallelujah.’ The publishers allege that Claude models generate identical or near-identical copies of these works in response to user prompts, and that AI-generated lyrics trained on their catalogues will ultimately compete with human-made songs.
In addition to monetary damages, the publishers are demanding that Anthropic destroy all infringing copies of the works and supply a full account of Claude’s training data, Music Business Worldwide reports.
A widening legal front across the music industry
The action arrives at the end of a sustained campaign by music publishers against Anthropic. Music Business Worldwide reports that this suit follows an earlier case brought by UMG, Concord, and ABKCO; a second action filed in January 2026 covering more than 20,000 works and seeking over $3 billion; a third case brought by BMG in March 2026 over 493 compositions; and a fourth filed by Round Hill Music on 17 August 2026. With Sony and Warner now litigating, all three major music publishers are simultaneously pursuing Anthropic over lyrics.
The complaint addresses the $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic reached with authors over pirated books, arguing in the filing that such a sum ‘is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation,’ citing an August 2026 Forbes report on a projected Anthropic IPO.
Sony and Warner are represented by Oppenheim + Zebrak, LLP, which also led the earlier Concord and UMG action against Anthropic, alongside Pryor Cashman LLP, Music Business Worldwide reports. The publishers have requested a jury trial.
Anthropic has already moved for partial dismissal in a separate music-publishers’ suit, with Amodei individually seeking to drop the direct copyright infringement claim against him, according to Music Business Worldwide. A not-yet-final Munich court ruling from November 2025 adds a European dimension: The Next Web reports that the court found storing memorised lyrics inside an AI model constitutes reproduction under copyright law, and that the EU’s text-and-data-mining exception does not apply when the source material was pirated.
An initial case management conference has been scheduled for 16 December 2026 before Judge Eumi K. Lee, with a case management statement due by 2 December 2026. The first hearing will set the litigation calendar that determines how quickly the question of AI training and copyright reaches a jury.