Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic in federal court on Aug. 28, alleging the AI company obtained and copied copyrighted song lyrics and sheet music to train its Claude models. Fortune highlighted the case in fresh coverage on Sept. 1; the lawsuit itself was filed four days earlier in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The 48-page complaint, case No. 5:26-cv-09217, also names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The publishers allege the defendants used BitTorrent to obtain pirated books containing compositions, scraped lyrics from sites including Musixmatch and LyricFind, scanned secondhand books, and downloaded third-party datasets. Those assertions have not been proven in court.
According to the complaint, the material included tens of thousands of compositions controlled by the plaintiffs. It cites songs including “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” “Eye of the Tiger” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.” The publishers further allege that Claude can return verbatim or near-verbatim lyrics in response to prompts and that Anthropic removed or altered copyright-management information during data processing.
Anthropic disputed the claims. In a response reported by Variety, a company spokesperson said the lawsuit recycles allegations already before courts and that Anthropic will defend itself robustly. The spokesperson said training generative AI models is transformative fair use, citing the Bartz authors’ case. In that litigation, the judge held that training on lawfully acquired books could qualify as fair use while rejecting Anthropic’s acquisition of pirated copies as fair use.
The publishers are seeking a jury trial, an injunction against further infringement, an accounting of Anthropic’s training data and methods, and destruction of infringing copies. They also request statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each willfully infringed work and up to $25,000 for each violation involving removal or alteration of copyright-management information. Those are requested statutory maximums, not an award, and Anthropic has not been found liable in this case.
The suit adds to a growing group of copyright cases testing both how AI developers obtain training material and whether particular uses of protected works are lawful.
Sources