30 August 2026

Sony and Warner sue Anthropic for illegally downloading music to train Claude

First reported

Engadget, TechCrunch and 1 other ran this on 29 August, a day before the next source picked it up.

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and other publishers filed suit in Northern California federal court against Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann for using tens of thousands of copyrighted songs to train Claude, the company's AI chatbot.
The complaint alleges Anthropic illegally downloaded millions of pirated books containing song lyrics and sheet music via BitTorrent, scraped lyrics from licensed platforms like MusixMatch without permission, and scanned used songbooks without consent.
This follows Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement in September 2025 with authors and publishers, where a judge ruled that while using copyrighted data for training could be legal, acquiring it through piracy was not.
A Munich court ruled in November 2025 that song lyrics stored within a model's parameters count as unauthorized reproductions and that outputting those lyrics is unlawful public disclosure, making model operators liable for what their systems generate.