Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic, alleging Claude training used pirated songbooks from shadow-library downloads involving about 7 million books, plus scraped lyr
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic, alleging Claude training used pirated songbooks from shadow-library downloads involving about 7 million books, plus scraped lyrics.
- The publishers allege Anthropic obtained copyrighted compositions through torrent downloads and lyric scraping.
- The complaint ties 7 million downloaded books to shadow libraries and says musical works were included in those collections.
- The publishers seek up to $150,000 for each work a jury finds was willfully infringed.
The publishers filed the complaint Aug. 28, 2026, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, naming Anthropic, co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The case focuses on sourcing.
It alleges Mann downloaded roughly 5 million books from Library Genesis in Jun. 2021, while Anthropic employees obtained another 2 million from Pirate Library Mirror in Jul. 2022. According to the publishers, those collections included unauthorized sheet music and songbooks containing their copyrighted works.
The filing also alleges Anthropic scraped lyrics from Musixmatch and LyricFind, services that license rights to display song lyrics. The complaint calls the alleged conduct “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” Two of the four counts center on torrenting.
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The publishers seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work a jury finds was willfully infringed. They say hundreds of their songs appeared in the downloaded files and allege the broader training activity involved tens of thousands of copyrighted compositions. The complaint seeks a jury trial.
Torrenting adds another legal issue because BitTorrent can upload pieces of a file to other users while a download is underway. That matters here. The publishers argue the alleged activity involved both obtaining and distributing unauthorized copies, extending the dispute beyond how Claude used material during training.
A prior federal ruling involving Anthropic separated lawfully acquired books from pirated copies.
The judge said buying print books, scanning them and using them for AI training could qualify as fair use, but called the pirate-library downloads “straightforward piracy but at massive scale.” That distinction now matters again.
Anthropic also won an early ruling in a separate lyrics case filed in 2023, when a judge declined to block Claude training and the company agreed to maintain output guardrails. Since then, Anthropic’s copyright disputes have increasingly focused on where training data came from, first with books and now with music publishing claims.
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