Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, a unit of Warner Music Group Corp. (NASDAQ:WMG), sued AI startup Anthropic on Friday in a Northern California federal court.
The complaint also names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann.
The publishers accuse Anthropic of “illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading” copyrighted songs to train its Claude AI models. Cited works include “Eye of the Tiger,” Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.”
Piracy Claims Tied to Earlier Book Ruling
The lawsuit references a June 2025 court ruling that found Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million pirated books from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. While the judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was fair use, the acquisition of pirated copies remained at issue and was later resolved through a $1.5 billion settlement.
