Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic on 28 August in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, naming chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants alongside the company. The complaint covers tens of thousands of musical compositions and asks for up to $150,000 for each work infringed wilfully, plus $25,000 every time copyright management information was stripped out.
The publishers allege that Anthropic assembled part of its training data from pirated book libraries pulled over BitTorrent, among them Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror, and that it scraped lyrics from licensed services including Musixmatch and LyricFind. Universal, Concord and ABKCO have been running a parallel lyrics case since 2023 that was widened in January.
The argument that sets this filing apart is what it does with Anthropic’s own record. On 20 July a judge gave final approval to a $1.5 billion class settlement covering roughly half a million pirated books, resolving claims from authors over the same torrenting. Anthropic paid without accepting that training on the works was unlawful. The publishers treat that as a company deciding infringement is a cost it can carry, and naming the two founders is meant to make that harder to keep at the corporate level.
Anthropic said it disagrees with the claims and will defend itself. The earlier settlement was about books as objects, not the songs printed inside them, and no court has decided whether lyrics in a pirated anthology are a fresh violation or part of one already paid for. The publishers have not said what sum would settle this, so the statutory ceiling multiplied by tens of thousands of works stays a headline figure rather than a demand.
