Sony and Warner sue Anthropic, seeking up to $150,000 per song

The music industry has opened its biggest AI copyright front yet. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic over what their complaint calls one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.

What the lawsuit says

The case was filed late on Friday, August 28, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, and it does not stop at the company: CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann are named as defendants personally. The publishers allege a campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading tens of thousands of copyrighted compositions to train Claude, including lyrics pulled from MusixMatch and LyricFind, services that pay for the licenses the AI lab allegedly skipped.

The damages theory is what sets this suit apart. Statutory damages run up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work, plus up to $25,000 for each removed copyright credit. Applied across tens of thousands of songs, the exposure reaches into the billions.

Where this fits

This is the fourth music-publisher lawsuit against Anthropic, and it lands a year after the company paid $1.5 billion to settle claims from book authors over the same training-data practices. That settlement resolved one category of works without settling the underlying question, and the publishers argue the conduct has continued.

Anthropic says it disagrees with the claims and intends to defend itself in court. These are allegations, and no court has ruled on them. What to watch is whether the personal claims against Amodei and Mann survive early motions: individual liability would change the risk calculus for AI executives well beyond this case.