Sony Music and Warner sue Anthropic over AI training data

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Friday, accusing Anthropic of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted music to train its Claude model. Defendants named include Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann.

The publishers describe the conduct as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." The complaint alleges Anthropic obtained millions of copies of books, lyrics, and sheet music through flagrant piracy rather than licensed acquisition.

The suit lands after a federal judge ordered Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion in the Bartz case, which established that using copyrighted material to train AI is permissible but obtaining it through piracy is not. The music publishers are building directly on that precedent, arguing Anthropic crossed the same line again with a broader set of works.

Concord Music and Universal Music Group are already in separate litigation against Anthropic under the same legal theory, represented by overlapping counsel. The accumulation of cases across the music and publishing industries signals coordinated legal pressure on AI training practices rather than isolated disputes.