Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and a group of other music publishers filed a new Anthropic copyright lawsuit on Friday. The complaint accuses the AI company of running what it calls “a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works.” The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. It also names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants.
The publishers accuse Anthropic of using thousands of copyrighted songs, including lyrics and sheet music, to train its Claude AI models without permission or payment. Music Business Worldwide first reported the filing late Friday. An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch in an emailed statement that the company disagrees with the claims and intends to “defend ourselves robustly in court.”
The Anthropic copyright lawsuit follows other disputes
This is not the first time Anthropic has faced accusations of building Claude on pirated material. Some of the same attorneys representing the publishers in this case also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a similar lawsuit filed in January. They also led Bartz v. Anthropic. In that case, a group of authors argued Anthropic trained its models on copyrighted books obtained without authorization.
A judge in the Bartz case ruled that training AI models on copyrighted material can be legal, but acquiring that material through piracy is not. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the claims, one of the largest payouts in a copyright case to date. That settlement covered books, not music catalogs, which is part of why Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell say they needed a separate case.
The new lawsuit against Anthropic goes further than the earlier ones. It accuses the company of “flagrant piracy,” alleging Anthropic used illegal torrenting to download millions of book files. Some of those files contained song lyrics and sheet music alongside literary text. The publishers argue Anthropic knew the material was pirated and used it anyway, rather than negotiate licensing deals up front.
What the publishers are seeking in the lawsuit against Anthropic
The complaint asks the court for statutory damages on each work Anthropic is accused of copying without authorization. It also seeks a permanent injunction barring further use of the disputed material. Given the volume of songs and books named in the filing, potential damages could run into billions of dollars if the publishers prevail. Any final figure would depend on how many individual works a jury or judge finds were infringed.
Anthropic has not filed a formal response to the complaint. The Anthropic copyright lawsuit is the company’s third active case over how it obtained data used to train Claude. It follows the Bartz settlement and the January case brought by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group. The outcome could shape how much AI companies pay to license creative works going forward, and how much leverage publishers hold in future negotiations over training data.