Sony Music, Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over Lyrics Scraping

Sony Music and Warner Chappell filed suit against Anthropic in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on August 29, 2026, adding two of the world's largest music publishers to a growing list of rights holders challenging how Claude was trained.

The complaint does not stop at the corporate entity. It names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally as defendants, a move that raises the stakes for the company's leadership beyond the usual corporate liability shield.

According to the filing, Anthropic scraped song lyrics from licensed lyric databases including MusixMatch and LyricFind rather than obtaining proper authorization. Songs cited as evidence range widely across eras and genres: 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 Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings."

The publishers allege infringement spanning tens of thousands of copyrighted works embedded in the data used to train Claude. Separately, the complaint accuses Mann of using BitTorrent to download more than five million pirated books, and claims Anthropic staff pulled at least two million additional titles from Pirate Library Mirror, a shadow library.

A pattern of piracy claims

This isn't Anthropic's first brush with allegations of pirated training data. The company settled a similar case brought by authors, Bartz v. Anthropic, for $1.5 billion after a judge found that training on copyrighted material can be lawful, but acquiring it through piracy is not.

That precedent gives the new plaintiffs a clear legal template to follow. Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO have already sued Anthropic separately, alongside distinct actions from BMG and Round Hill Music, meaning the company is now fighting on multiple fronts within the music industry alone.

The financial exposure here could be severe. Sony Music and Warner Chappell are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance in which copyright management information was allegedly stripped from the data, a combination that plaintiffs say could total several billion dollars.

Anthropic has pushed back publicly. "We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court," the company said in response to the filing.

The Bartz settlement suggests Anthropic's legal team already understands the cost of losing this argument. Whether the outcome here mirrors that $1.5 billion resolution, or breaks new ground given the individual defendants named, will depend on how the court treats the piracy allegations against Mann and other employees.