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On Friday evening, a number of leading global music publishers filed a high-profile lawsuit against Anthropic. The plaintiffs describe the defendant’s actions as one of the most extensive and brazen instances of intellectual property infringement in history. This complaint marks the beginning of a protracted legal battle that will span the worlds of music, AI, and copyright protection mechanisms in the new technological era.
Representatives from Sony Music and Warner Music filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Friday. The defendants in the case include Anthropic itself, its CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The exceptional significance of this lawsuit by Sony and Warner lies in its global scope. The court documents allege that Anthropic unlawfully trained its models on tens of thousands of copyrighted works owned by music publishers. This differs significantly from other similar cases, where the claims involve a much narrower list of works.
By comparison, BMG’s lawsuit against Anthropic alleges infringement involving 493 compositions. The 48-page complaint states that Anthropic, along with its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, launched an unlawful campaign involving illegal downloading, torrent downloading, and scraping of third-party works on a massive scale. All of this was done to develop, launch, and generate colossal profits from a line of AI models called Claude.
In addition, the plaintiffs accuse Anthropic of pirating thousands of copyrighted musical works and are seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for each individual instance of infringement.
An analysis by Sarah Fisher of Axios highlights that the legal framework for music copyright is complex. As a result, AI developers risk facing a series of lawsuits regarding the same song. A single track may contain several distinct copyrighted works – such as lyrics, a phonogram, or a musical composition – the rights to which are often divided among various owners, including performers, publishers, and record labels. Commercial releases that require separate copyrights provide plaintiffs with compelling grounds to demand statutory damages. To receive such payments, rights holders do not even need to prove actual financial losses in court.
This lawsuit is not the first time Anthropic has been accused of using pirated material to train its products. In September 2025, Anthropic entered into the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to authors and publishers. At the same time, the music industry has long been known for its uncompromising stance in court regarding copyright infringement – a fact well remembered by anyone who lived through the heyday of Napster and LimeWire.
The defendant’s official position is as follows: “Anthropic does not agree with the publishers’ allegations and intends to vigorously defend its position in court.”
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