The publishing arms of Sony Music and Warner Music have sued Anthropic. The companies accuse the AI firm of illegally using copyrighted songs to train its Claude models, Axios reports.
The 48-page lawsuit was filed Friday, August 28, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Besides Anthropic itself, the defendants include CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann.
The publishers accuse Anthropic of running a “brazen scheme” to illegally download copyrighted music through torrents. They say the company copied thousands of protected songs to develop its Claude model series. The publishers are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per work. They are also seeking up to $25,000 for each instance in which Anthropic allegedly stripped out embedded data identifying the songs’ authors and usage terms.
Some of the lawyers on the case also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, which filed a separate suit against Anthropic back in January. The same lawyers previously represented authors in the Bartz v. Anthropic case, which ended in a $1.5 billion settlement approved by a federal court in San Francisco in late July.
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As part of the Bartz settlement, the court found that training AI on books qualifies as fair use under copyright law, but acquiring those books through piracy does not. “We reached this settlement in 2025, after a landmark court ruling that training AI on books is fair use,” said Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic’s deputy general counsel. She added that the ruling rests on copyright law that still applies today.
Anthropic disputes the music publishers’ claims. “We disagree with the publishers’ claims,” a company spokesperson said. Anthropic intends to defend itself vigorously in court.
The lawsuit is not Sony’s only move against the use of music by artificial intelligence. Back in February, the company developed technology to detect original musical works within AI-generated compositions.
Rights holders have also sued other AI developers over unauthorized use of protected content. Last year, Warner Bros. Discovery sued the AI service Midjourney over its unauthorized use of copyrighted character imagery to generate pictures.
