Sony, EMI and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic over pirated music works. The publishers filed the complaint in late August 2026. They allege Anthropic torrented books containing song lyrics and sheet music. Named defendants include co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. Internal staff messages quoted in the suit praise pirate libraries, including "zlibrary my beloved". Publishers say Claude reproduces lyrics verbatim and generates imitation songs. They argue AI songs now topping charts dilute songwriter royalties. They want an injunction and a full accounting of training data and methods. Anthropic calls it a third recycled suit and says AI training is fair use. It denies training commercial Claude models on the pirated books.
What changed
Anthropic had settled with book authors for $1.5 billion and won a fair use ruling in Bartz.
- $1.5 billion authors settlement
- 7 million+ books pirated
- $2 trillion Anthropic valuation
- complaint filed 28 August 2026
Sources