Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and several other music publishers have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The publishers allege that Anthropic engaged in a “brazen campaign” of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works to train its AI model, Claude, constituting “blatant theft” of thousands of copyrighted materials (TechCrunch, 2026).

Anthropic has responded to the allegations, stating through an emailed statement to TechCrunch that the company disagrees with the publishers’ claims and intends to “defend ourselves robustly in court.” This lawsuit is not Anthropic’s first encounter with intellectual property litigation; the company previously faced a case led by the same legal representatives involving Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, as well as the Bartz v. Anthropic case, where authors accused the AI lab of using copyrighted works to train its products. In the Bartz case, Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion after a judge ruled that while using copyrighted works for training was legal, acquiring the content through piracy was not (TechCrunch, 2026).

The latest lawsuit distinguishes itself by being particularly broad, building upon previous cases and accusing Anthropic of “flagrant piracy” through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including those containing lyrics and sheet music (TechCrunch, 2026).

This is a summary. Read the original at techcrunch.com.