Sony Music and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic

Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The music publishers allege that Anthropic used tens of thousands of copyrighted works to train its AI model Claude, without permission. According to The Verge, the companies are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance of identifiable copyright data being stripped.

The lawsuit, which was reported by multiple outlets, claims that Anthropic conducted a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works" to develop its AI models. TechCrunch reports that the publishers accuse Anthropic of "blatant theft" and name co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants. Axios describes the suit as one of the "largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history".

This is not the first intellectual property lawsuit faced by Anthropic. Axios notes that the company agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers in September 2025. The Verge adds that this latest suit could result in damages of several billion dollars if the court awards the maximum amount.

Brief written by urgent.news from The Verge, TechCrunch, Axios, Techmeme — 4 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.