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Sony Music, Warner Music Sue Anthropic Over Alleged Illegal Training Data

Confirmed1 source · Aug 29, 2026

Major music publishers filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing Anthropic of illegally torrenting and scraping copyrighted works to train its Claude AI model.

Sony Music, Warner Music Sue Anthropic Over Alleged Illegal Training Data
Image via TechCrunch

What happened

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and other music publishers sued Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging a "brazen campaign" of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works to train Claude. The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of using thousands of copyrighted works including books containing lyrics and sheet music without authorization, and specifically charges "flagrant piracy" through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies. This is the latest copyright lawsuit against Anthropic; the same legal team previously pursued cases against the company by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group (filed January) and led the Bartz v. Anthropic case brought by authors, in which a judge ruled that while using copyrighted works for AI training could be legal, acquiring that content through piracy was not.

Context

Anthropic faces escalating litigation over the sources used to develop its commercial AI products. The Bartz ruling established that the legality of training methods depends on how content is acquired, not merely on its use—a principle the music publishers' lawsuit applies to the audio and publishing domain. The breadth of this latest suit and its focus on torrenting suggests plaintiffs are building on precedent from the prior cases while broadening the scope of alleged misconduct. These lawsuits collectively represent significant legal and financial risk to the company as it scales Claude's deployment.