Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Join Anthropic Copyright Fight With New Lyrics Lawsuit

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have become the latest major music publishers to sue Anthropic, escalating the music industry's legal fight over the copyrighted material allegedly used to train the company's Claude artificial intelligence models.

The lawsuit was filed Aug. 28 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and names Anthropic, CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.

Dozens of publishing entities affiliated with Sony and Warner are listed as plaintiffs.

The publishers accuse Anthropic of engaging in what they describe as a large-scale effort to obtain copyrighted works without permission through torrenting, scraping and downloading material from unauthorized sources before using that material to develop Claude.

According to the complaint, the allegedly copied material includes song lyrics and sheet music owned or controlled by the publishers.

The works identified in reporting on the lawsuit span songs associated with artists including The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson and other major performers and songwriters.

The publishers allege that Anthropic did not simply use copyrighted material during model development but also removed or failed to preserve copyright-management information associated with some of the works.

They further claim Claude is capable of reproducing portions of copyrighted material in response to user prompts.

The lawsuit seeks statutory damages that could reach as much as $150,000 for each work found to have been willfully infringed, along with other remedies.

The plaintiffs are also seeking court orders restricting future unauthorized use of their works and addressing copies they allege were unlawfully obtained.

Anthropic disputes the allegations.

"We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court," an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

The new case expands a copyright fight that MusicTimes has followed throughout 2026.

BMG Rights Management filed a separate lawsuit against Anthropic in March, alleging the company used copyrighted lyrics associated with artists including Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber and The Rolling Stones to train Claude.

That case focused on hundreds of compositions and included allegations that Anthropic gathered copyrighted material from websites and unauthorized online repositories.

Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO are also pursuing a separate case against Anthropic involving thousands of musical works.

That litigation has already moved into battles over whether parts of the publishers' claims should be dismissed.

Independent publisher Round Hill Music also sued Anthropic in August, alleging hundreds of copyrighted songs were used without authorization in AI training and indicating that the number of works at issue could eventually expand substantially.

The Sony and Warner filing therefore does not introduce a new legal theory to the music industry's dispute with Anthropic.

Instead, its significance lies in the growing number and scale of publishers willing to pursue those claims.

With Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell now bringing their own case, publishing companies connected to all three major music groups — Universal, Sony and Warner — are engaged in copyright litigation involving Anthropic.

The publishers' allegations also arrive amid broader court battles over how AI developers obtain the enormous datasets used to build generative models.

Anthropic previously faced litigation from authors who alleged copyrighted books had been obtained from pirated sources for AI training.

That case resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement concerning pirated books, after a federal judge distinguished between the legality of using lawfully obtained copyrighted material for AI training and the separate issue of acquiring copyrighted works through piracy.

The music publishers are attempting to make a similar distinction in their new complaint.

Their case focuses not only on whether copyrighted works can legally be analyzed during AI training, but on how Anthropic allegedly acquired the works in the first place.

Anthropic has maintained in copyright litigation that its AI training practices are protected by fair use, while publishers and other copyright owners continue to argue that training does not excuse unauthorized copying or piracy.

No court has yet ruled on the merits of the Sony and Warner publishers' new allegations.

For the music industry, however, the Aug. 28 filing marks another escalation in a legal battle that is increasingly moving beyond individual catalogs.

What began as disputes involving particular groups of songs is now bringing much of the major music-publishing business into direct conflict with one of the world's most prominent AI companies.

Originally published on Music Times