Sony Music, Warner Sue Anthropic Over ‘Brazen Campaign’ of

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and a coalition of music publishers have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging that the AI company engaged in a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works.” The suit, lodged late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was first reported by Music Business Worldwide. The publishers accuse Anthropic of “blatant theft” by using thousands of copyrighted songs and sheet music to train its AI model, Claude, without permission or compensation. Anthropic had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication. TechCrunch will update this story as new information becomes available. This lawsuit is not Anthropic’s first brush with intellectual property claims. Some of the same attorneys involved in this case also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a separate action filed in January, and they led the earlier Bartz v. Anthropic case, where authors alleged that the company used copyrighted books to train its models without authorization. In that landmark case, Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in damages after a judge determined that, while using copyrighted material for training is permissible under certain circumstances, acquiring that material through piracy is not. While the current lawsuit shares similarities with previous claims, it is notably broader. It accuses Anthropic of “flagrant piracy” through the use of illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including those containing lyrics and sheet music. The plaintiffs argue that this conduct goes beyond standard AI training practices and constitutes direct infringement at an unprecedented scale. As the legal landscape around AI and copyright continues to evolve in 2026, this case highlights the growing tension between technological innovation and the protection of creative works. The outcome could set a significant precedent for how AI companies source and use training data, particularly in the music industry.

via TechCrunch AI