Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over copyrighted songs used for AI training

Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in California, accusing the AI company of using copyrighted songs to train its models without permission.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann are also named as defendants, according to Axios. The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic used “tens of thousands” of copyrighted works to train its models, with the publishers describing the practice as a “brazen campaign” of illegally downloading music, The Verge reports.

The publishers are seeking up to $150,000 per copyrighted work, along with as much as $25,000 for each alleged instance of removing copyright information. At the maximum statutory rates, The Verge estimates the damages could reach several billion dollars. Anthropic has not commented on the lawsuit.

The latest case follows a string of similar lawsuits from the music industry. Concord Music Group, Universal Music Group and ABKCO sued Anthropic in January 2026 over more than 20,000 songs, seeking potential damages of more than $3 billion. BMG Rights Management brought its own case in March, followed by Round Hill Music in August. Across the lawsuits, publishers have accused Anthropic of using their music as training data without securing the necessary licenses or paying rights holders.

The legal pressure extends beyond music. Anthropic previously faced a lawsuit from book authors over material used to train its models, eventually agreeing to a $1.5 billion settlement. The cases are part of a much larger copyright fight now playing out across the AI industry, as courts grapple with whether companies can train models on protected material without licensing it first. With no consistent legal standard yet in place, the outcome could help shape how AI developers acquire and use training data going forward.