Sony Music and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic

The companies call it “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”The companies call it “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”by Aug 29, 2026, 6:19 PM UTCImage: Cath Virginia / The VergeTerrence O'Brien is the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed suit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California seeking damages for “tens of thousands” copyrighted works. The companies are asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance when identifiable copyright data was stripped. In total, the damages could amount to several billion dollars if a court finds in Sony and Warner’s favor and awards the maximum amount.This is just the latest high-profile suit against Anthropic, which recently settled a suit brought by the publishing industry for $1.5 billion. It’s also faced multiple lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO, plus separate suits from BMG and Round Hill Music.In addition to suing Anthropic as an entity, the complaint names Co-Founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. The suit alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. It also claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which paid to license content from the labels.Plaintiff Music Publishers, a group of the world’s leading music publishers, bring this action to hold accountable the culprits behind one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history. Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s “Claude” series of artificial intelligence (“AI”) models.Specific songs named as being found in Anthropic’s training data include Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On a Prayer,” Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and TaylorSwift’s “Paper Rings.” Antrhopic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Terrence O'BrienThe Verge DailyA free daily digest of the news that matters most.