Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over Claude training

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic on August 28, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging a campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted song lyrics and compositions to train Claude, and naming co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. The publishers are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work plus damages for removed copyright-management information, following earlier suits from Universal Music Publishing, BMG and Round Hill Music that together put all three major music publishers in litigation against Anthropic.