Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging a "brazen campaign" of intellectual property theft

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have sued Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging the AI lab ran a “brazen campaign” to steal copyrighted material. The complaint was filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and was first reported by Music Business Worldwide. The publishers claim Anthropic used thousands of copyrighted works to train its Claude AI model through illegal “torrenting, scraping, and downloading.” Anthropic could not be reached for comment before publication. The lawsuit references earlier IP actions involving some of the same legal teams, including the Bartz case, where a judge ordered Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion, finding piracy to obtain content was not lawful even if use for training can be legal.