Warner Music Group Corp. and Sony Music Entertainment have sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic, owner of Claude, over the alleged piracy of thousands of songs to train its AI models.
Calling it “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history,” the label giants named co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as additional individual defendants in their Aug. 28 lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The duo allegedly “conducted a brazen campaign” to illegally torrent, scrape and download the copyrighted compositions from pirate sources “on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits” from its AI models.
According to the lawsuit, the label groups seek up to $150,000 per work infringed and up to $25,000 per removal of copyright management material from a work. That could result in billions in total compensation for the $965 billion AI company, who filed for a $2 trillion initial public offering in June with an expected public debut date in October.
‘Cost of doing business’
The music groups further referred to the 2024 class-action lawsuit brought to Anthropic by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. Anthropic paid $1.5 billion to settle claims of pirating books from online sites Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.
“But Anthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright theft,” according to the filing. “And $1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation.”
Though both headquartered in New York, Warner Music and Sony Music have substantial presence in Los Angeles, including offices and studios. It’s also not the first time that AI companies have faced a backlash from the music industry in L.A. In 2024, the two joined forces with several others, including Santa Monica-based Universal Music Group, to sue Suno AI and Udio AI for using copyrighted recordings in song generation.
However, the music industry is slowly adapting to AI. In addition to an initial collaboration post-settlement in 2025, Suno launched a new line of AI models partnering with Warner Music and BMG Rights Management Wednesday, where users can generate music based on participating licensed work.
