Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a lawsuit against AI company Anthropic, accusing it of large-scale intellectual property theft to train its Claude models. The complaint, lodged on 28th August, names Anthropic's chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants, and describes the alleged conduct as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." The case adds to a growing list of copyright disputes facing Anthropic from major rights holders across the music and publishing industries.

The publishers are seeking damages for tens of thousands of copyrighted works, up to $150,000 per work, plus $25,000 for each instance where copyright data was allegedly stripped, potentially totalling several billion dollars. Songs cited include Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings." Anthropic says it will "defend ourselves robustly in court," but the company was previously ordered to pay $1.5 billion in June 2025 after a court found it had downloaded over seven million pirated books, and it also faces separate suits from Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG and Round Hill Music.