Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the AI company of copying song lyrics and other protected material to train its Claude models. The complaint was filed on 28 August 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California and names chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. Music Business Worldwide first reported the case.
What the complaint alleges
The publishers accuse Anthropic of torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted material, then copying it during the training of Claude models and in the models' responses to users. The complaint states that the allegedly affected catalogue covers tens of thousands of musical compositions, naming songs including "Eye of the Tiger", "September", "Uptown Funk" and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings".
The filing also alleges that Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites including MusixMatch and LyricFind, and that it used datasets including Common Crawl, The Pile and Books3. It claims Claude can produce verbatim or near-verbatim lyrics when users re-prompt the model. Each of these points is an allegation in the complaint. None has been tested or found by the court.
What the publishers are seeking
The complaint seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work the publishers say was willfully infringed, plus up to $25,000 for each alleged removal or alteration of copyright-management information. It also asks for:
- a jury trial;
- an account of Claude's training data and methods;
- destruction of infringing copies;
- other relief as the court sees fit.
Because the complaint describes a catalogue of tens of thousands of works, the theoretical maximum exposure is large, although statutory damages at the upper end are rarely awarded across the board and no figure has been determined.
Context: a widening set of cases
This is not the first copyright action Anthropic has faced from the music industry. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO filed a separate case in January 2026 over more than 20,000 works, seeking more than $3 billion. Anthropic also agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with book authors in a separate case involving pirated training material.
The new filing extends the dispute deeper into music publishing, a business built on licensing catalogues. The publishers' position is that training on licensed works, and reproducing those works in model outputs, should not bypass that licensing market. The earlier book authors' case ended in settlement rather than a judicial ruling on the underlying legal questions, so those questions remain open.
Anthropic's response
An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company disagrees with the publishers' claims and intends to defend itself in court. As of 30 August 2026, no substantive defence filing has been reported, and the court has made no findings on any of the allegations.
Why the case matters beyond California
The lawsuit was filed in California, but its central question, whether copyrighted creative work can be acquired, trained on and commercially reproduced without a licence, is being watched by rights-holders and AI users internationally. Music catalogues are licensed businesses, and the outcome could shape how training data is sourced and priced across the industry.
What is established and what is merely claimed
Established so far: the complaint was filed on 28 August 2026 in the Northern District of California; the plaintiffs are Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell entities; Anthropic, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann are named as defendants; the publishers are seeking statutory damages, a jury trial, an account of training data and destruction of infringing copies; and Anthropic has said publicly that it disputes the claims and will defend itself.
Merely claimed, not proven: that Anthropic torrented, scraped or downloaded the publishers' catalogues; that Claude was trained on the named songs; that Claude reproduces lyrics verbatim or near-verbatim; and that copyright-management information was removed or altered. These remain allegations in a complaint. No court has ruled on them, and Anthropic contests them.