{"id":155420,"date":"2026-08-29T20:10:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T20:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/155420\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T20:10:21","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T20:10:21","slug":"music-publishers-sue-anthropic-allege-blantant-theft-of-copyrighted-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/155420\/","title":{"rendered":"Music publishers sue Anthropic, allege “blantant theft” of copyrighted music"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Some of the world’s largest music publishers filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Anthropic<\/a> late Friday night, alleging “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” <\/p>\n

Why it matters: The suit is the opening salvo in what is now likely to be a yearslong fight over music, AI, and how intellectual property is protected in a new era of technology. <\/p>\n

Driving the news: Units of Sony Music and Warner Music filed the suit in federal court in northern California late Friday night, naming Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants. <\/p>\n

The big picture: The Sony\/Warner lawsuit is notable because it’s broad. <\/p>\n

It alleges Anthropic unlawfully trained its models off “tens of thousands” of music publishers’ copyrighted compositions, whereas other lawsuits have focused on a narrower set of works. <\/p>\n

BMG’s lawsuit against Anthropic, for example, claims infringement against 493 compositions. <\/p>\n

What they’re saying: “Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ series of artificial intelligence (‘AI’) models,” the plaintiffs write in the 48-page complaint. <\/p>\n

Thought bubble from Axios’ Sara Fischer: The music’s copyright system is structurally complicated, which can expose AI companies to multiple lawsuits for the same song. <\/p>\n

One song can have several copyrighted components, such as the lyrics, sound recording, or composition, that can be split among different copyright holders, including artists, publishers, and labels. <\/p>\n

Commercially released songs that require individual copyrights give plaintiffs a strong case to make for statutory damages, which don’t require a copyright holder to prove their financial losses in court. <\/p>\n

Between the lines: This suit is not the first time Anthropic has been accused of piracy to train its models. <\/p>\n

In September 2025, the company agreed to the largest copyright settlement<\/a> in U.S. history, a $1.5 billion deal with authors and publishers. <\/p>\n

Yes, but: The music industry is notorious for being litigious when it comes to copyright, as anyone who was around in the heyday of Napster and LimeWire can attest. <\/p>\n

For the record: Anthropic was not immediately available to comment on the suit. <\/p>\n

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with additional information throughout. <\/p>\n

AI is moving fast. Axios AI+ keeps you ahead. Sign up free at Axios.com<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some of the world’s largest music publishers filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday night, alleging “one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155421,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[24,53,75538,3261,75537,75539,75540],"class_list":["post-155420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-benjamin-mann","tag-dario-amodei","tag-ruhani-kaur","tag-sony-warner","tag-warner-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}