Sony and Warner sue Anthropic over Claude training

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and other music publishers have sued Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann, accusing the Claude maker of a large-scale copyright infringement campaign. The complaint was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The publishers say Anthropic illegally acquired and copied copyrighted musical compositions while building Claude, including lyrics and works allegedly pulled from pirated book collections, lyric sites and other datasets. They also allege Claude can reproduce protected songs verbatim and that guardrails added after earlier music-publisher litigation can be bypassed.

The case expands a wider copyright fight around AI training. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG and Round Hill have already brought related claims against Anthropic. Sony and Warner Chappell say their new complaint covers tens of thousands of works and seeks statutory damages of up to 150,000 dollars per willfully infringed work, plus other remedies.

Anthropic told TechCrunch that it disagrees with the publishers’ claims and intends to defend itself. The case matters because it tests whether frontier model companies can treat large scraped or pirated corpora as training fuel, and whether later output filters are enough when rightsholders allege the underlying copies were unlawful.