Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic and, by name, co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The complaint landed Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The charge: illegally torrenting and scraping tens of thousands of compositions to train Claude.
Key takeaways
- Defendants: Anthropic, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann — federal court in Northern California
- Up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work, up to $25,000 per removal of rights management data
- “Tens of thousands” of compositions in play — exposure running into billions of dollars
- Data sources named in the complaint: Library Genesis, Pirate Library Mirror, Common Crawl, The Pile, Books3
- Third case in a year, following the $1.5B Bartz settlement
Two data acquisition channels
The complaint splits its allegations into two tracks. The first is torrenting pirate libraries — Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror — from which Anthropic allegedly pulled books containing song lyrics and sheet music. The second is scraping?scraping: Automated harvesting of content from websites by a program. Unlike torrenting, it pulls from a service’s publicly reachable interface. the licensed services MusixMatch and LyricFind, plus the Common Crawl, The Pile and Books3 datasets.
Datasets and libraries the complaint names as training data sources:
The publishers do not stop at training. They claim Claude reproduces lyrics verbatim and that its guardrails can be bypassed by simply re-prompting. The dispute therefore shifts from data acquisition to model outputs.
One of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.
From the complaint filed by Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music.
Third legal front in twelve months
In September 2025 Anthropic settled Bartz for $1.5 billion — the court held that acquiring content through piracy was illegal, even where training on lawfully purchased books fell within fair use?fair use: The US doctrine of permitted use. It allows using a copyrighted work without permission when the purpose is transformative and does not harm the market for the original.. In January 2026 Concord Music Group, UMG and ABKCO demanded over $3 billion for more than 20,000 works.
| Case | When | Scale | Claim |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bartz | September 2025 | books | $1.5B settlement |
| Concord, UMG, ABKCO | January 2026 | over 20,000 works | over $3B |
| Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell | August 2026 | tens of thousands of compositions | exposure in the billions |
The new complaint differs on two counts: it pins personal liability on the founders and targets generated outputs, not just training data. Anthropic rejects the claims — “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court,” a company spokesperson said.
Why it matters
The Bartz settlement priced how data was acquired but left the question of model outputs open. If a court treats verbatim lyric reproduction as a separate infringement, the cost stops being one-off and attaches to every generation in production.
Naming the founders shifts risk from the balance sheet onto individuals — a stronger signal to the rest of the industry than another nine-figure settlement. Anthropic’s valuation starts to hinge not on model quality but on data provenance.
What’s next?
- Anthropic’s expected first move: a motion to dismiss?motion to dismiss: A filing asking the court to throw out a complaint without weighing evidence, on the ground that even if every allegation is true there is no legal basis for liability., particularly the claims against Amodei and Mann
- The Concord/UMG/ABKCO case sits before the same court and will set the fair use reference point
- Whether Claude’s lyric-reproduction filters actually hold remains contested — the complaint says they do not
