Sony Music, Warner Music Units Sue Anthropic Over Copyrighted Songs

According to Axios, units of Sony Music and Warner Music filed a federal lawsuit in Northern California late Friday accusing Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works to train its Claude AI models. The plaintiffs said Anthropic pirated thousands of musical works and are seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages per infringed work. The complaint calls the alleged conduct "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." Axios noted the case follows Anthropic's September 2025 agreement to a $1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors and publishers, the largest such settlement in U.S. history.