Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed suit against Anthropic on Friday, August 28, in federal court in California, alleging that the company systematically took tens of thousands of copyrighted songs to train its Claude chatbot. The complaint calls it one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.
The filing describes two routes. It alleges Anthropic used illegal torrenting to obtain millions of pirated books from sites including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, and separately scraped lyrics directly from licensed platforms such as MusixMatch and LyricFind. Songs named in the complaint include Ain't No Mountain High Enough, All I Want For Christmas Is You, Eye Of The Tiger and Taylor Swift's Paper Rings.
The money being sought is where the case gets its headline. The publishers want up to $150,000 in statutory damages for each infringed work, plus a further $25,000 for every instance of copyright management information being removed. Across tens of thousands of compositions, that arithmetic runs into the billions.
It is the fifth publishing case against the company in under three years. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord and ABKCO sued in October 2023 and filed again in January 2026 seeking more than $3 billion over 20,000 works, and MusicSuey covered Anthropic's attempt to have part of that case dismissed. BMG brought a third case in March 2026, and Round Hill sued both Anthropic and Suno for up to $1 billion each last month.
The publishers argue the pattern is deliberate. Anthropic settled with authors for $1.5 billion in September 2025 over similar piracy allegations, and the new complaint frames those settlements as a cost of doing business rather than a correction. It also says the guardrails added after earlier litigation are trivially circumvented by re-prompting the model until it produces the same lyrics.
Valuation is part of the calculation on both sides. The complaint cites a Forbes report putting Anthropic at a $2 trillion valuation ahead of a projected October IPO, which makes the company both a bigger target and better able to absorb a judgment.
Beyond damages, the publishers want every infringing copy destroyed and a full accounting of what went into Claude's training data. That second demand is the one with reach past this case: nothing else in the current wave of litigation has forced a public inventory of a frontier model's training corpus. They have demanded a jury trial and hired the same legal team that ran the UMG and Concord cases.
The facts
- The suit was filed on August 28 in federal court in California.
- Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music are the plaintiffs.
- The complaint alleges tens of thousands of songs were used to train Claude.
- It names torrenting from Library Genesis and scraping from MusixMatch and LyricFind.
- Damages sought run to $150,000 per work plus $25,000 per removal of rights information.
- Anthropic settled with authors for $1.5 billion in September 2025.
- The complaint cites a projected $2 trillion valuation ahead of an October IPO.
- The publishers want infringing copies destroyed and an accounting of training data.
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