August 31, 2026, (Inside AI) — Anthropic faces a multibillion-dollar lawsuit from Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell over alleged misuse of tens of thousands of songs to train its Claude AI models.
The publishers filed the suit in a California court on August 28, naming Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants. They claim the company scraped, torrented, and downloaded copyrighted lyrics without authorization.
Named works include Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's Ain't No Mountain High Enough, and Survivor's Eye of the Tiger. The suit also cites Bon Jovi's Livin' on a Prayer and Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.
The publishers describe the alleged conduct as one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history. They seek up to $150,000 per infringed work and $25,000 for each removal of identifying data.
The complaint alleges Anthropic reproduced lyrics in responses to user prompts, not just during training. It also claims the company stripped attribution metadata, denying songwriters valuable credit.
Pirate Datasets Fuel the Allegations
The lawsuit draws on evidence from a separate copyright case brought by US authors. That case, which Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion, revealed the company downloaded at least 7 million books from pirate websites.
The music publishers argue the same datasets contained lyrics and sheet music. They also claim Anthropic scraped legal platforms like Musixmatch and LyricFind, plus archives such as Common Crawl.
At least 20,000 musical compositions are allegedly involved. The publishers say Anthropic chose to harvest unauthorized copies to avoid paying licensing fees for AI training.
Ed Newton-Rex, a UK-based composer and campaigner, said he was not surprised rights holders are defending themselves against a company with a history of downloading and training AI models on huge libraries.
Anthropic has faced prior claims from Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group. The company told TechCrunch it disagrees with the claims and will defend itself robustly in court.
A Wider Crackdown on AI Music
The case lands amid growing legal pressure on AI music firms. This month, AI generator Suno lost a copyright infringement case against German licensing agency GEMA over songs including Boney M's Daddy Cool.
Anthropic is preparing for a stock market listing that could value the company at $2 trillion. The outcome of this suit could shape how AI developers license creative works.
