The world’s largest music publishers have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging “one of the largest and most brazen ongoing copyright thefts in history.”
According to the plaintiffs, the case marks the start of a long-running fight over music, artificial intelligence, and copyright protection in the digital era.
According to reports, subsidiaries of Sony Music and Warner Music filed the lawsuit in federal court in Northern California, naming Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.
The suit stands out for its scope, accusing Anthropic of illegally training its models on “tens of thousands” of copyrighted musical compositions, in contrast to other legal actions targeting a smaller number of works. BMG’s lawsuit against Anthropic, for instance, covers 493 compositions.
According to the 48-page complaint: “Defendants Anthropic and its founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, have carried out a brazen campaign of illegally accessing, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and generate enormous profits from the ‘Claude’ family of AI models.”
The publishers argue that Anthropic copied thousands of copyrighted musical works and are seeking damages that could reach hundreds of thousands of dollars per infringed work.
Commenting on the legal angle, Axios’s Sara Fischer notes that the music copyright system is structurally complex, which can expose AI companies to multiple lawsuits over a single song.
A single song can include several separately protected elements, such as lyrics, the sound recording, or the composition, each belonging to different rights holders, including artists, publishers, and record labels. Because commercial songs require separate copyrights, plaintiffs are able to seek statutory damages without needing to prove financial harm in court.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time Anthropic has faced accusations of copyright infringement over how it trained its models.
In September 2025, the company agreed to the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history, worth $1.5 billion, with authors and publishers.
The music industry, meanwhile, is well known for its litigiousness on copyright matters, as shown during the Napster and LimeWire era.
For its part, Anthropic said: “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and intend to vigorously defend our position in court.”
