Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed suit against Anthropic in Northern California federal court late Friday, accusing the maker of Claude of running what they call a massive piracy operation to train its AI models.
The complaint alleges Anthropic illegally torrented and scraped thousands of copyrighted musical works—lyrics, sheet music, compositions—from shadow libraries to build Claude's training corpus. The publishers are seeking up to $150,000 per infringement, plus $25,000 each time Anthropic stripped copyright notices from works. With tens of thousands of songs allegedly involved, damages could reach billions.
This is Anthropic's second collision with piracy claims this year. In July, a judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic, a class action filed by authors whose books were pirated via LibGen and similar sites. That case established a legal line: training on licensed content may be fair use, but acquiring that content through piracy is not. The music publishers cite the Bartz discovery documents in their new complaint.
Anthropichas called itself the "ethical AI company," but the lawsuits now bracket it on both sides—books in July, music in August. The publishers note they've signed AI training licenses with other companies; Anthropic, they claim, chose to download first and ask never.