Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic over song lyrics and sheet music. The complaint was filed on 28 August 2026 in federal court in northern California. Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann are named personally as defendants. The publishers say Anthropic downloaded pirated books through BitTorrent to build a permanent text library. They also allege scraping of lyrics sites, destructive scanning of second-hand books, and use of Common Crawl, The Pile and Books3. A further claim says Claude was trained to reproduce lyrics word for word in answers to users. The publishers also allege Anthropic stripped copyright identifying information from the text it used. They cite the earlier Bartz ruling and Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement in that case. They seek damages and an injunction, and have demanded a jury trial. The publishers say they already license compositions for authorised AI use.
What changed
Anthropic had settled an authors' book piracy class action for $1.5 billion.
- $1.5 billion Bartz settlement
- 7 million books torrented
- 36 publisher plaintiffs
- filed 28 August 2026
Sources