Anthropic is facing a fresh copyright lawsuit from major music publishers, who accuse the AI company of running what they describe as a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works.”
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and several other publishers filed the complaint late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Named alongside the company are co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The publishers allege “blatant theft,” claiming Anthropic used thousands of copyrighted works to train its AI model Claude.
Anthropic could not be reached for comment prior to publication.
What the Music Publishers Allege
The publishers accuse Anthropic of “flagrant piracy” through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including titles that contain song lyrics and sheet music. The complaint is broader than earlier actions against the company and builds directly on prior litigation, expanding the scope of the claims tied to how the AI lab sourced its training data.
This is not the first intellectual property challenge Anthropic has confronted. Some of the same attorneys behind the new filing also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a separate case filed in January.
The Bartz Precedent Casts a Long Shadow
The legal team also led Bartz v. Anthropic, a landmark case in which a group of authors accused the company of using copyrighted works to train products such as Claude. Anthropic was ordered to pay EUR 1 billion in that case after a judge ruled that while it was legal for the AI lab to use copyrighted material, acquiring that content through piracy was not.
That distinction sits at the heart of the new lawsuit. While the arguments are similar, the latest complaint centers on the method of acquisition, focusing on allegations that Anthropic obtained protected material through illegal downloading rather than licensed channels.
The case adds to the mounting legal pressure facing AI developers over how large language models are trained. Courts are increasingly drawing a line between the use of copyrighted works and the way that content is collected, a question that could shape how AI companies build their datasets going forward. The new complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
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