Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and several other music publishers filed a lawsuit in August 2026 against AI company Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, accusing the company of conducting a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works” to train its AI model Claude.
The suit was filed late Friday, August 29, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and was first reported by Music Business Worldwide. The publishers allege “blatant theft,” claiming Anthropic used thousands of copyrighted works without authorization, including books containing lyrics and sheet music obtained through illegal torrenting.
This is not Anthropic’s first intellectual property lawsuit. Some of the same attorneys behind this case also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a separate suit filed in January, and previously led the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which a group of authors accused Anthropic of using copyrighted material to train Claude. In that landmark case, a judge ruled that while using copyrighted works for AI training was legal, acquiring that content through piracy was not — and ordered Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion.
The new lawsuit builds on prior cases but is notably broader in scope, with its central focus on accusations of “flagrant piracy” through illegal torrenting of millions of copies of books. Anthropic had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.
The case may carry significant consequences for the AI industry, as it suggests that how AI companies acquire training data — not just whether they use it — could be a critical legal distinction. The $1.5 billion Bartz ruling already established that precedent, and this latest suit could extend its reach further.
Source: TechCrunch