{
  "id": 4300163,
  "title": "Anthropic Sued By Sony, Warner For Allegedly Stealing Tens of Thousands of Songs, Torrenting Copyrighted Works",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/29/anthropic-sued-by-sony-warner-for-allegedly-stealing-tens-of",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-08-29T23:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Slashdot",
    "slug": "slashdot",
    "url": "https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/08/29/2149242/anthropic-sued-by-sony-warner-for-allegedly-stealing-tens-of-thousands-of-songs-torrenting-copyrighted-works"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Sony and Warner Music Group have filed a massive lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging they allegedly stole tens of thousands of copyrighted songs and other musical works in order to train their AI models, according to Axios. This lawsuit marks one of the largest and most aggressive instances of alleged intellectual property theft in history, as reported by The Verge.\n\nAnthropic's founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, are accused of engaging in a \"brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading\" copyrighted works on a massive scale, according to the lawsuit's 48-page complaint. The plaintiffs claim Anthropic pirated thousands of copyrighted musical works, which could potentially lead to damages of several billion dollars if a court rules in Sony and Warner's favor, as stated by The Verge.\n\nThe lawsuit alleges that Anthropic employees used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, in addition to downloading at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. Additionally, the complaint states that Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which paid to license content from the labels.",
  "summary": "Axios reports: Some of the world's largest music publishers filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday night, alleging \"one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.\" The suit is the opening salvo in what is now likely to be a yearslong fight over music, AI, and how intellectual property is protected in a new era of technology... The…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 6,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "Techmeme",
        "title": "Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic, Dario Amodei, and Benjamin Mann, alleging tens of thousands of copyrighted songs were used to train Claude's LLMs (Tim Ingham/Music Business Worldwide)",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/29/sony-music-and-warner-chappell-sue-anthropic-dario-amodei-and",
        "published": "2026-08-29T15:30:01.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "Axios",
        "title": "Music publishers sue Anthropic, allege \"blantant theft\" of copyrighted music",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/29/music-publishers-sue-anthropic-allege-blantant-theft-of-copyrighted",
        "published": "2026-08-29T16:10:34.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "The Verge",
        "title": "Sony Music and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/29/sony-music-and-warner-chappell-are-suing-anthropic",
        "published": "2026-08-29T18:19:53.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "TechCrunch",
        "title": "Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging a “brazen campaign” of intellectual property theft",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/29/sony-music-warner-sue-anthropic-alleging-a-brazen-campaign-of",
        "published": "2026-08-29T18:41:59.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "Business Insider",
        "title": "Sony accuses Anthropic of 'brazen campaign' to train Claude on its music — and wants up to $150,000 a song",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/29/sony-accuses-anthropic-of-brazen-campaign-to-train-claude-on-its",
        "published": "2026-08-29T19:05:05.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}