Units of Sony Music and Warner Music filed a lawsuit late Friday night in federal court in northern California, accusing Anthropic of what the complaint calls "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."
The defendants named in the filing are Anthropic, Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei and co‑founder Benjamin Mann. The complaint runs 48 pages and details the plaintiffs’ allegations.
What the plaintiffs allege
According to the complaint, Anthropic and its founders carried out a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale to develop, operate, and profit from Anthropic’s "Claude" series of artificial intelligence models. The plaintiffs contend that the company pirated thousands of copyrighted musical works.
The suit seeks damages of hundreds of thousands of dollars for each infringed work, as laid out in the 48‑page complaint.
Background and context
This is not the first time Anthropic has faced accusations of using copyrighted material to train its models. In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to a settlement with authors and publishers valued at $1.5 billion — described at the time as the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history.
The music industry has a long history of litigation over copyright issues, dating back to disputes around file‑sharing services such as Napster and LimeWire. Legal battles over how AI is trained on copyrighted content could extend for years and help define how intellectual property is protected in the age of generative AI.
Additional details
The plaintiffs’ detailed allegations and the specific evidence they rely on are contained in the 48‑page filing. Anthropic was not immediately available to comment.
This story is developing and further updates are likely.
