Sony Music Publishing (SMP) and Warner Chappell Music (WCM) have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Anthropic, the developer of the AI Claude, as well as its co-founders Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei.
The two companies allege that Anthropic illegally collected and used countless musical works for which they hold copyrights to train Claude. Specifically, they claim the training data includes songs by artists such as Taylor Swift and Mariah Carey. They also pointed out that these works were systematically reproduced multiple times as output data generated by Claude.
The lawsuit seeks damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, and up to $25,000 per work in cases where the removal of copyright management information is suspected. As the works involved number in the tens of thousands, the damages are expected to reach the scale of billions of dollars. In addition, they are seeking the destruction of copies of the infringing works and disclosure regarding the training data.
Source: Sony and Warner jointly sue Anthropic, claiming musical works were used for Claude training in "the largest and most egregious theft of intellectual property in history" (GIGAZINE, 2026-08-31)