Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and numerous other music publishers have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic and co‑founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, accusing the AI lab of conducting a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works." The complaint was submitted late Friday to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
According to the plaintiffs, Anthropic used thousands of copyrighted works to train its Claude AI model and obtained much of that material through unauthorized channels. The suit specifically alleges large‑scale torrenting and other illicit acquisition methods that yielded millions of books, including publications containing lyrics and sheet music.
Allegations in the complaint
The filing accuses Anthropic of "flagrant piracy" by acquiring copyrighted content via torrent networks and other scraping and downloading techniques, then using those materials in model training. The publishers frame these actions as blatant theft of protected creative works.
Anthropic did not provide a comment before the article was published.
Related litigation and background
This action follows earlier intellectual property suits involving Anthropic. Some of the same lawyers representing the music publishers in this case also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a separate case filed in January, and they led the Bartz v. Anthropic litigation. In the Bartz case a judge ordered Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion after finding that, while using copyrighted works for model training can be lawful, acquiring those works through piracy is not.
While the new lawsuit raises arguments similar to those in prior cases, it is broader in scope and builds on those precedents by emphasizing the extent of the alleged illegal torrenting and the volume of copyrighted material obtained, including works containing lyrics and sheet music.
Implications and next steps
If the court pursues the plaintiffs' claims, the case could further clarify legal boundaries around how AI developers may obtain and use copyrighted material for training. The litigation timeline will depend on the defendants' response, pretrial motions and any potential settlements. Observers will watch how precedents from Bartz and related cases influence outcomes in this broader suit.
