Key points
- Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and 33 affiliated publishers sued Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann in San Jose federal court on Friday, August 28 (case 5:26-cv-09217).
- The 48-page complaint seeks up to $150,000 per infringed work and says Exhibit B lists tens of thousands of compositions used to train Claude.
- Two of the four claims target Amodei and Mann personally, and the filing cites Anthropic's $1.5 billion authors settlement and a reported $2 trillion October IPO.
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music and 33 affiliated publishers sued Anthropic, its CEO Dario Amodei and its co-founder Benjamin Mann in federal court in San Jose on Friday, August 28. The 48-page complaint describes "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history" and asks for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work. The publishers demanded a jury.
Sony Music Publishing is a unit of Sony Group (SONY). Warner Chappell is the publishing arm of Warner Music Group (WMG). Several Hipgnosis entities joined the suit as well, 35 plaintiffs in total.
The complaint cites findings from an earlier case. In June 2021, according to the filing, Mann downloaded at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis using BitTorrent, and Anthropic employees took another two million from a site called Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022. The publishers say those books contained the lyrics and sheet music to their compositions, and the complaint names "Eye of the Tiger," "All I Want for Christmas Is You" and "Livin' On a Prayer" among the works. It alleges Amodei "expressly authorized and directed" the downloading.
Torrenting is one of several acquisition routes described. The complaint says Anthropic also scraped lyrics from licensed sites such as Musixmatch and LyricFind. The filing says it also destructively scanned millions of second-hand books and downloaded datasets including Books3 and Common Crawl. Exhibit B lists tens of thousands of compositions the publishers say were used in training, and the filing says Claude models generate "verbatim and near-verbatim copies" of lyrics in response to user prompts.
The $1.5 billion settlement is on page 3
Anthropic settled a class action from book authors for $1.5 billion after a judge in the same district found it had torrented more than seven million books, conduct the court called "straightforward piracy but at massive scale." The new complaint calls that figure "obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation."
Count I of the suit accuses all three defendants of direct infringement through torrenting. Count II is a contributory claim against Amodei and Mann alone. Count III is a broader infringement claim covering Anthropic's training and its model outputs. Count IV says the company stripped copyright management information, the credits and identifying data attached to lyrics, while cleaning its training text. The publishers also want an accounting of Anthropic's training data and court-supervised destruction of infringing copies.
| Figure | What the complaint ties it to |
|---|---|
| $150,000 | Statutory ceiling per willfully infringed work |
| $25,000 | Ceiling per violation for removing copyright management information |
| $1.5 billion | Anthropic's settlement with book authors, cited on page 3 |
| 7 million+ | Pirated books the court found Anthropic torrented in 2021 and 2022 |
| Tens of thousands | Compositions listed in Exhibit B |
| 35 | Publisher plaintiffs |
What the complaint says about the IPO
Twice, the complaint cites an August 13 Forbes report that Anthropic is preparing an IPO as soon as October at a valuation near $2 trillion. Anthropic was reported to be days from filing on August 21, at twice the valuation it set in May.
Salesforce (CRM) told investors this week it booked a $2.6 billion mark-to-market gain on its Anthropic stake. Amazon (AMZN) and Alphabet (GOOGL) have invested billions of dollars in Anthropic, and Meta's own planning documents projected spending up to $10 billion a year on Anthropic's tools.
Anthropic is already defending a lyrics suit from a separate publisher group led by Concord, where damages claims reach $3 billion and Amodei is asking the court to drop a direct-infringement claim against him personally, according to Music Business Worldwide. A January 2026 piracy suit from music publishers and a Round Hill action seeking up to $1 billion each from Anthropic and Suno are also pending.
The publishers say they are not against AI training. The complaint states they "have entered licenses permitting the authorized use of their musical compositions in connection with AI," and that "even the most revolutionary of technologies must develop within the bounds of the law, and Anthropic's Claude models are no different."
Sources
- Complaint, Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-09217 (N.D. Cal., filed Aug. 28, 2026)
- Axios, "Sony, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging 'blatant theft' of intellectual property" (Aug. 29, 2026)
- Music Business Worldwide on the $3 billion Concord lyrics suit
- Forbes, "Anthropic Eyes $2 Trillion In October IPO" (Aug. 13, 2026), cited in the complaint
