Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging a “brazen campaign” of intellectual property theft

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and other music publishers sued Anthropic and its co-founders in federal court, accusing the company of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works to train Claude. Anthropic denied the claims and said it will defend itself, while the lawsuit builds on earlier copyright cases against the AI lab.

The case intensifies pressure on AI companies over not just whether copyrighted material can be used for training, but how that material is obtained. After Anthropic’s $1.5B loss in the Bartz case over pirated acquisition, publishers appear to be targeting data provenance as a key legal and commercial battleground for generative AI.