Sony Music, Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic, Naming Founders Personally

Two founders named as individual defendants

Anthropic's official website

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. According to the complaint, first reported by Music Business Worldwide, the suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and reportedly submitted late Friday night. The complaint describes Anthropic's conduct as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario Amodei (CEO) and Daniela Amodei (president), along with seven former OpenAI employees, to build the conversational AI Claude. What stands out about this lawsuit is that it names not just the company but the two founders individually as defendants.

Benjamin Mann allegedly torrented 5 million books

The complaint lays out specific conduct. It alleges that Benjamin Mann used BitTorrent to download more than 5 million pirated books, and that employees separately obtained at least 2 million more from the Pirate Library Mirror. On top of that, the suit alleges Anthropic scraped lyrics without authorization from sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind, which pay licensing fees to record labels for that content.

To be clear, this doesn't mean Sony Music and Warner Chappell hold the rights to those 5 million books. Their argument is that Anthropic torrented an entire trove of illegal material, and that lyrics and sheet music the two companies hold rights to were mixed in among it.

Songs named in the complaint include Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Bon Jovi's "Livin' On a Prayer," Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings." The plaintiffs claim tens of thousands of such works, including these, were used as training data for Claude.

Up to $150,000 per song, with total damages potentially in the billions

The plaintiffs' damages demand is similarly specific. They're seeking up to $150,000 for each work used without authorization, plus a separate claim of up to $25,000 for each instance where copyright management information was allegedly stripped. If the court accepts all of the plaintiffs' claims and applies the maximum penalty, total damages could run into the billions of dollars.

Claim	Maximum damages per unit
Unauthorized use of a work	$150,000
Removal of copyright management information	$25,000

Not Anthropic's first copyright lawsuit

Anthropic is already fending off several copyright suits. Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO filed a $3 billion lawsuit back in January, BMG filed a separate suit citing lyrics from Bruno Mars and The Rolling Stones, and Round Hill Music has sued both Suno and Anthropic over copyright as well.

The most significant precedent so far came from a lawsuit filed by authors. Judge William Alsup ordered Anthropic to pay a $1.5 billion settlement, while also ruling that training AI on copyrighted material is itself legal. What he penalized wasn't the training — it was downloading the books from illegal shadow libraries in the first place.

This Sony Music/Warner Chappell complaint follows a similar logic, focusing less on whether training itself is legal and more on how the material was obtained. According to TechCrunch, some of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in this case also worked on the Concord/UMG suit and the case before Judge Alsup. Anthropic had not responded to requests for comment as of publication.

Editor's take

The most notable thing about this complaint isn't the size of the damages — it's the decision to name the founders personally. When a company loses a lawsuit, it pays a fine and moves on. When individuals remain defendants, personal assets and future conduct come into play too. The specific detail about Benjamin Mann's BitTorrent use fits the same pattern — it reads like a deliberate strategy to frame the conduct as one person's actions rather than company policy, in order to pursue individual liability.

Even after the $1.5 billion settlement with authors, music publishers and labels keep piling on with lawsuits, and the reason is straightforward. Judge Alsup's ruling drew a clear line — training is legal, illegal acquisition isn't — which made attacking the acquisition method a winning strategy. With UMG, Concord, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music already in the mix, and now Sony Music and Warner Chappell joining as well, Anthropic is effectively fighting the entire music industry in court.

This matters for Korean companies too. Any team training or fine-tuning its own AI models should check right now whether its data sources are properly licensed and whether the crawling process stripped out copyright management information — because that check is far cheaper than the litigation bill that follows if it's skipped. The next thing to watch, in the weeks ahead, is how Anthropic responds to this suit and how many more similar lawsuits other AI companies end up facing.