Sony and Warner want Claude's maker to pay for the songs it learned from

By Zara Kincaid · 2026-08-31

The complaint

Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC and Warner Chappell Music filed a complaint in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on 28 August 2026, naming Anthropic PBC, chief executive Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.^[1] Case No. 5:26-cv-09217 sits as the bluntest legal challenge yet to how large AI developers assembled their training sets.

The complaint alleges that in June 2021, Benjamin Mann used the BitTorrent protocol to illegally torrent at least five million copies of pirated books from Library Genesis, and in July 2022, at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror, a total of seven million volumes that the publishers say included works containing lyrics and sheet music to hundreds of their compositions.^[2] The filing names specific titles among the alleged unauthorised inputs: "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", "All I Want for Christmas is You", "Eye of the Tiger", "Livin' On a Prayer" and "September", among others.^[2]

What the publishers say

The complaint's language is unsparing. Anthropic and its founders, it reads, "have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic's 'Claude' series of artificial intelligence ('AI') models."^[2] Naming the founders individually, rather than the company alone, signals that the publishers want personal accountability attached to data acquisition decisions made before Anthropic became a multibillion-dollar enterprise.

The relief sought includes statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c), up to $25,000 per removal or alteration of copyright management information under 17 U.S.C. § 1203(c)(3)(B), injunctive relief, destruction of infringing copies, an accounting of training data, and attorneys' fees and costs.^[2]

Anthropic's position

An Anthropic spokesperson said the company "disagrees with the publishers' claims" and intends to "defend ourselves robustly in court."^[3] Anthropic offered no further detail on its legal theory. That brevity fits early-stage litigation posture, where substantive arguments get reserved for court filings rather than press statements.

A growing docket

Sony and Warner's filing is the third major copyright action to land on Anthropic's docket in under three years. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO sued Anthropic in October 2023 over roughly 500 musical works, a case later transferred to the Northern District of California. Universal and Concord filed a second suit in January 2026 broadening the claims to more than 20,000 works and seeking over $3 billion in statutory damages. The Sony and Warner complaint adds a distinct set of publishers and a specific factual theory centred on BitTorrent activity rather than general scraping.

Parallel litigation is moving against other AI music firms at the same time. Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment sued Suno in the District of Massachusetts over stream-ripping allegations in August 2026, while Sony Music filed against Udio in California in July 2026, asserting unauthorised use of more than 30,000 sound recordings. The Northern District of California now holds several of these cases simultaneously, which raises the possibility that a single ruling on fair use or the legality of torrent-sourced training data could resolve questions across all of them. The next scheduled court event in Case No. 5:26-cv-09217 had not been publicly listed on the docket as of 29 August 2026.^[1]

Zara Kincaid

Zara Kincaid writes about artificial intelligence and search. Her focus is what happens to businesses when the front page of the internet stops being a list of links and starts being an answer.