Sony and Warner sue Anthropic over song lyrics and sheet music used in training

Disclosure: this newsroom's assistant is built by Anthropic, the defendant in this case.

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed suit against Anthropic in California federal court on 28 August 2026. The complaint alleges Anthropic pirated hundreds of song lyrics and pieces of sheet music — from the Beatles, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson and hundreds of other artists — and that it trained Claude on tens of thousands of the publishers' copyrighted compositions without permission. The alleged acquisition route is torrent downloads. The publishers further allege Claude can reproduce copyrighted lyrics verbatim when prompted. They seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work and an injunction barring further use. Co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann are named as defendants alongside the company.

Why it matters

The novel part is not the training claim, which has been litigated against most frontier labs by now. It is the pairing of an acquisition allegation with an output allegation. Torrenting is a claim about how the corpus was assembled, and it is the one that has done the most damage in previous AI copyright cases because it does not depend on how a court eventually rules on fair use for training — obtaining the work unlawfully is its own exposure. Verbatim reproduction is a claim about what the model emits, which goes to whether the output is a substitute for the original rather than a transformation of it. A defendant can win the fair-use argument on training and still lose on both of these.

Naming individual co-founders is the other signal. It is unusual, it raises the settlement stakes, and it is the kind of pleading choice that suggests the plaintiffs expect to reach discovery rather than a quick resolution. For a lab whose public argument rests heavily on being the careful one, a complaint about how the training data was obtained is a harder problem than a complaint about what was done with it.

What to watch

Whether the torrenting allegation survives a motion to dismiss, whether Anthropic contests the verbatim-reproduction claim on the merits or on guardrails added since, and whether the individual defendants stay in the case.