Sony and Warner sue Anthropic, alleging a brazen campaign of lyric theft for Claude

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic.

The complaint was filed on Friday.

The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The complaint names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants.

Dario Amodei is Anthropic’s co-founder and chief executive.

The publishers call the conduct one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.

The publishers allege a campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale.

The publishers say the works were used to develop Anthropic’s Claude AI models.

The publishers say Anthropic reaped enormous profits from Claude.

The publishers say tens of thousands of their compositions were infringed.

The publishers say Anthropic collected thousands upon thousands of their copyrighted songs.

The complaint names songs including “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Eye of the Tiger” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.”

The publishers seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work.

The publishers seek up to $25,000 for each alleged removal of copyright-management information.

Statutory damages at the amounts sought could reach the billions of dollars.

The publishers demand a jury trial.

The complaint alleges Benjamin Mann used BitTorrent in June 2021 to download at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis.

The complaint alleges Anthropic employees torrented at least two million more books from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022.

The publishers say Anthropic took pirated books from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.

The publishers say those torrented books included lyrics and sheet music to their compositions.

The publishers allege Anthropic scraped lyrics from licensed sites including MusixMatch and LyricFind.

The publishers allege Claude reproduces their lyrics in model outputs.

Anthropic agreed to pay about $1.5 billion to authors to settle a case over pirated books.

The publishers say even revolutionary technologies must develop within the bounds of the law.

Sony and Warner are represented by Oppenheim + Zebrak, counsel in the Concord/UMG case, and by Pryor Cashman.

The lawsuit was first reported by Music Business Worldwide.

Universal Music, Concord and ABKCO have pursued separate lyric cases against Anthropic.

UMG, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic in Nashville in October 2023 over about 500 songs.

Those publishers filed a January 2026 suit covering more than 20,000 works and seeking over $3 billion.

BMG sued Anthropic in March 2026 over 493 compositions.

Round Hill Music filed a suit against Anthropic on August 17.

Anthropic said it disagrees with the publishers’ claims and intends to defend itself in court.

Investors have discussed an Anthropic IPO at a valuation of as much as $2 trillion.