Sony and Warner sue Anthropic, seeking up to $150,000 per song
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic late on August 28, 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, naming CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann personally. The publishers allege Anthropic torrented, scraped and downloaded tens of thousands of copyrighted compositions to train Claude, including lyrics from MusixMatch and LyricFind, and they seek up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work plus up to $25,000 per stripped copyright credit, a multi-billion dollar exposure. Anthropic says it disagrees and will defend itself in court.