Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The publishers allege that the AI lab ran a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works to train its Claude model. This action follows a similar case brought by authors in January where Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion after a judge ruled that acquiring content through piracy remains illegal even if the usage itself was permissible. The new filing expands on previous arguments by accusing Anthropic of flagrant piracy to obtain millions of copies of books containing lyrics and sheet music. The publishers describe this as blatant theft rather than fair use, asserting that the company used thousands of protected works without permission. Anthropic could not be reached for comment before this report was published.
The case matters because it targets the specific method of data acquisition rather than just the act of training. Previous rulings established that using copyrighted material is legal if obtained properly, but this lawsuit focuses entirely on the illegal means used to gather that data. If successful, the outcome could set a stricter precedent for how large AI labs source training data from the music industry. It also signals a growing willingness among publishers to pursue multiple fronts against the same defendant. The legal team behind this suit previously represented Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group in earlier disputes.
- The lawsuit was filed late Friday in California.
- Anthropic faces accusations of torrenting millions of book copies.
- Previous rulings allowed usage but banned piracy for data collection.
