Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, calling it "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history," according to TechCrunch and Engadget.
The complaint accuses Anthropic of a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works" to train its Claude models, TechCrunch reported. It names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants alongside the company, according to Engadget.
The publishers cite thousands of copyrighted compositions, including "Eye of the Tiger," "All I Want for Christmas Is You" and "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," and are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work plus $25,000 for each instance Anthropic allegedly stripped copyright management information, according to Engadget. The publishers requested a jury trial.
"We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court," Anthropic said, according to TechCrunch. It is the second music-publisher suit against the company this year: Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group sued earlier in 2026 seeking more than $3 billion, and Anthropic separately agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a similar suit brought by authors after a judge ruled that training on copyrighted books could be lawful even though acquiring them through piracy was not.
For builders training models on scraped data, the courts keep drawing the same line: using copyrighted material to train is a separate legal question from how it was obtained. A pirated dataset is what turns a copyright dispute into a nine-figure damages claim.