Sony, Warner Sue Anthropic, Accusing It of 'Blatantly Stealing' Intellectual Property

Dynamic Beating AI News Flash: Sony Music and Warner Music Group's publishing arm filed a lawsuit Friday night in the Northern District of California federal court against Anthropic, naming its CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants, alleging massive copyright infringement in the development and operation of the Claude series AI models.

The plaintiffs, in a 48-page complaint, stated that Anthropic obtained copyrighted works through illegal seed downloads, web scraping, and downloads, and used "tens of thousands" of music works to train the model, far exceeding BMG's previous lawsuit involving 493 works. The plaintiffs also accused Anthropic of pirating thousands of copyrighted music works and sought damages of hundreds of thousands of dollars per infringing work.

Anthropic responded, stating, "We do not agree with the publishers' allegations and will actively defend ourselves in court." Previously, Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors and publishers in September 2025.