Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over training on tens of thousands of songs

Music publishers filed late on Friday 28 August 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, naming Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann and alleging a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works" to train Claude. The complaint reaches tens of thousands of compositions, wider than earlier suits, and asks up to $150,000 per work plus up to $25,000 for each instance where copyright-management information was stripped. Anthropic says it disagrees with the claims and will defend itself in court.

What it means If you generate or commission audio with a frontier model, the per-work damages maths in this complaint is the number your licensing position now has to survive.