Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic Over Copyrighted Song Lyrics

In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a class action from authors who said the company trained its models on pirated books ^[4]. That settlement did not close the piracy chapter: in January 2026, Concord Music Group, Universal Music Publishing Group, and ABKCO Music filed a separate suit covering more than 20,000 songs and seeking over $3 billion, alleging Anthropic had also concealed torrenting violations during discovery in an earlier, narrower case ^[4]. Those publishers amended their complaint again in July 2026, just as the authors' settlement won court approval ^[5]. Now Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have joined 35 total music publishers in a new, separate suit filed August 28-29, 2026 in the same Northern District of California courthouse, this time naming CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann personally as defendants ^[1][2]. Each new filing widens the circle of plaintiffs and sharpens the personal stakes, turning what began as one settlement into a rolling, multi-front legal campaign.

The complaint's central claim isn't that Anthropic used lyrics without a license - it's how the company allegedly obtained them. Plaintiffs say Anthropic ran a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale, pulling material from piracy archives like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror rather than paying for it ^[2][3]. The complaint alleges co-founder Benjamin Mann personally used BitTorrent to download at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis in June 2021, and that Anthropic employees torrented at least two million more works from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022 ^[2]. On top of that, publishers allege Anthropic scraped lyrics directly from licensed platforms MusixMatch and LyricFind - sites built specifically to sell the very licenses Anthropic is accused of bypassing ^[2][3].

US copyright law allows statutory damages up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work, plus up to $25,000 per instance of stripped or altered copyright management information ^[2]. With 35 publishers now involved and the parallel Concord suit alone citing over 20,000 songs ^[4], the theoretical exposure runs into the billions before legal fees are counted. The timing compounds the pressure: the lawsuit lands while Anthropic is reportedly pursuing an IPO at a valuation discussed around $2 trillion, meaning a company trying to sell investors on a clean growth story now has to explain, in public court filings, why its own co-founder allegedly torrented millions of pirated works ^[3].

Online reaction split between disdain for Anthropic's alleged conduct and skepticism that either the tech company or the publishers suing it have the moral high ground. AI-and-copyright commentator Ed Newton-Rex helped amplify the complaint's core allegation - a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works at scale, with two Anthropic co-founders, Dario Amodei and Ben Mann, named personally as defendants. Discussion elsewhere kept circling back to one unresolved question: why Anthropic specifically, rather than Meta, OpenAI, or Google, which commenters say face similar accusations - the question recurred repeatedly without anyone in the discussion settling on an answer. Much of the discussion also expected the case to end in a quiet settlement that enriches the publishers rather than the artists behind the songs, framing that outcome as simply the cost of doing business for a well-funded AI lab. Not everyone accepted the publishers' framing either: one commenter, u/karer3is, argued the suit is really about publishers seeking a change of management [pricing] rather than protecting artists, and others in the discussion made a related point that copyright law as it stands tends to enrich corporations more than creators. Running alongside that was a more technical disagreement over whether large language models actually 'store' copyrighted text verbatim - pointing to a memorization study showing Llama 3.1 reproducing passages of Harry Potter - versus the counterargument that model weights encode statistical patterns rather than a literal copy of the training data, a distinction some in the discussion said matters more for the underlying infringement question than for this suit's narrower piracy allegation.