Sony Music and Warner Music's publishing arms filed a lawsuit against Anthropic on Friday night in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, naming CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants. The suit alleges that Anthropic massively infringed music copyrights while developing and operating its Claude line of AI models.
The 48-page complaint claims Anthropic obtained copyrighted works via illegal seed downloads, scraping, and downloading, and used 'tens of thousands' of musical works to train its models — a scale far exceeding the earlier BMG lawsuit over 493 works. The plaintiffs also accuse Anthropic of pirating thousands of copyrighted tracks and demand hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for each infringed work.
Anthropic responded: "We disagree with the publishers' claims and will vigorously defend ourselves in court." Back in September 2025, the company reached a $1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors and publishers.