Music publishers sue Anthropic over use of copyrighted lyrics in AI training

Thirty-five music publishers, including Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, have filed a copyright lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The complaint, filed on 28 August 2026, alleges that Anthropic obtained copyrighted musical works through torrenting, scraping and downloading and used copies of those works in developing and training its Claude AI models. The publishers also claim that Claude can reproduce copyrighted song lyrics in its responses.

The lawsuit identifies tens of thousands of musical compositions and names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants alongside the company. The publishers are seeking damages for alleged copyright infringement and other violations, and have requested a jury trial.

Anthropic has rejected the allegations and said it intends to defend itself in court.

The case follows a 2025 ruling in a separate lawsuit brought by authors against Anthropic. In that case, the court found that using lawfully acquired books to train AI models could qualify as fair use, but reached a different conclusion over millions of books obtained from pirated sources and stored by the company.

Anthropic has also previously faced litigation from music publishers. In an earlier case involving Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO, the company agreed to maintain measures designed to prevent Claude from reproducing copyrighted lyrics. A court later declined to block Anthropic from training on the publishers’ lyrics at the preliminary stage, finding that potential harm could be addressed through damages.