Sony Music and Warner Chappell Music filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic in California federal court, naming CEO Dario Amodei and cofounder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. The complaint alleges Anthropic illegally downloaded, scraped, and torrented tens of thousands of copyrighted songs -- including works by the Beatles, Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, and Leonard Cohen -- to train its Claude AI models, drawing lyrics and sheet music from pirate sources such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror and from licensed lyric sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind.
The publishers are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work plus $25,000 for each instance of removed copyright-management information, a total that could reach billions of dollars given the scale of works involved. It is the fifth music-copyright suit against Anthropic from the same law firm, following earlier cases from Universal, Concord and ABKCO and a January 2026 filing covering more than 20,000 works and seeking $3 billion.
Anthropic said it will "defend ourselves robustly," arguing that training AI on copyrighted material is "transformative" use. The company previously paid $1.5 billion to settle a separate class action from book authors in September 2025 -- the largest publicly disclosed AI copyright settlement to date.