Music giants Sony-Warner sue Anthropic over using lyrics to train AI
Global music publishers Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic in a US court, alleging it infringed tens of thousands of copyrighted songs to train AI models.
The Verge and Music Business Worldwide reported that on August 28, 2026, music giants Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music jointly filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against Anthropic, developer of the Claude family of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, naming CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants.
The complaint alleges that Anthropic committed serious copyright infringement by using tens of thousands of songs to train its AI models without permission. The plaintiffs claim the data was downloaded via BitTorrent, citing an earlier lawsuit over the company’s alleged acquisition of pirated books, and that lyrics were copied from lyric websites including Musixmatch and LyricFind.
The music publishers are seeking the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each infringed work. They are also seeking up to $25,000 for each instance in which Copyright Management Information was removed from a work.
The case marks a major milestone in the global dispute between the music industry and AI developers. It could set an important precedent defining how intellectual property and copyrighted music may be used to train AI models in the future.