Sony Music, Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic, Name Founders Personally

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, who serves as CEO, and Daniela Amodei, who serves as president, along with seven others who came from OpenAI. The company builds the conversational AI Claude. What stands out about this lawsuit is that it names not just the company but both founders as individual 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 obtained at least 2 million more from Pirate Library Mirror. On top of that, it accuses Anthropic of scraping lyrics without authorization from sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind, which pay licensing fees to record labels for that content.

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 totals potentially in the billions

The damages the plaintiffs are seeking are equally specific. They're asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus a separate claim of up to $25,000 for each instance where copyright management information was stripped. If the court accepts all of the plaintiffs' claims and applies the maximum amounts, total damages could reach into the billions of dollars.

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

Not Anthropic's first copyright fight

Anthropic is already facing several copyright lawsuits. Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO filed a $3 billion lawsuit back in January, and BMG filed a separate suit citing lyrics from Bruno Mars and the Rolling Stones. Round Hill Music has also sued both Suno and Anthropic over copyright.

The heaviest precedent so far came from a lawsuit brought by authors. Judge William Alsup ordered Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion in a settlement, while ruling that the act of training AI itself was lawful. What he penalized wasn't the training — it was downloading the books from illegal shadow libraries in the first place.

This latest complaint from Sony Music and Warner Chappell follows a similar logic — the focus isn't on whether training is legal, but 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 lawsuit and the case before Judge Alsup. Anthropic had not responded to requests for comment as of the time of reporting.

Editor's take

What deserves attention here isn't the size of the damages sought but the decision to name the founders personally. When a company loses a lawsuit, it pays a fine and moves on. When individuals remain defendants, their personal assets and future conduct come under scrutiny too. Spelling out Benjamin Mann's BitTorrent use in such detail fits that same pattern — it reads as a strategy to establish personal liability by framing the conduct as one individual's actions rather than company policy.

The wave of lawsuits from music publishers and labels following the $1.5 billion settlement with authors makes sense once you see the pattern. Judge Alsup's ruling drew a clear line — training is legal, illegal acquisition isn't — and that turned "how was the data obtained" into a winning line of attack. With UMG, Concord, ABKCO, and BMG already in the fight, and now Sony Music and Warner Chappell joining in, Anthropic is effectively facing off against the entire music industry at once.

This matters for domestic companies too. If your team is training or fine-tuning AI models in-house, it's far cheaper to check now — whether your data sources are properly licensed, and whether your crawling process strips out copyright management information — than to pay for a lawsuit later. Over the coming weeks, the industry will be watching for how Anthropic responds to this suit and whether other AI companies start facing similar claims of their own.