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Sony Music and Warner Music have filed a lawsuit accusing artificial intelligence company Anthropic of stealing copyrighted music on a massive scale to build its Claude chatbot, in a case that could reshape how courts treat AI companies' use of protected creative works.
The suit, filed late Friday in federal court in Northern California, was first reported by Axios on Saturday. It names Anthropic itself as well as its chief executive, Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann, as defendants.
In a 48-page complaint, the music publishers accuse Anthropic of running what they describe as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."
The companies affiliated with Sony and Warner say Anthropic obtained copyrighted material without permission in order to develop and commercialize its Claude series of AI models.
The complaint goes further, alleging that Anthropic and its founders "conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits" from the technology.
The plaintiffs claim Anthropic illegally copied thousands of copyrighted musical works and are seeking damages that could run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for each work found to have been infringed.
Given the scale of the claimed infringement, the total damages sought could be substantial, though the complaint does not specify an aggregate figure.
This is not the first time Anthropic has faced legal action over how it trained its AI systems. In September 2025, the company agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with a group of authors and publishers, a deal that was described at the time as the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history.
The lawsuit filed Friday signals that the legal reckoning over AI training data is far from over, and could set precedent for how courts weigh the interests of copyright holders against the rapid commercial expansion of generative AI companies.
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