Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over Massive Catalog Infringement

The major label publishing arms have unified their legal front against generative AI. On August 28, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a joint federal lawsuit in the Northern District of California against Anthropic, its CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann. According to a report by Music Business Worldwide, the publishers characterize the company's unauthorized training practices as “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” This filing completes the circle: publishing divisions across all three major music companies are now actively litigating against the Claude developer. Universal Music Publishing Group previously sued alongside Concord and ABKCO, seeking over $3 billion in an expanded January 2026 filing, followed by independent actions from BMG and Round Hill Music. Sony and Warner are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work willfully infringed, plus up to $25,000 for each removal of copyright management information. Across "tens of thousands" of cited compositions—including classics like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “All I Want for Christmas is You”—Anthropic’s liability lands well into multi-billion-dollar territory. The complaint relies on internal communications unearthed in prior litigation, noting Mann once described pirated repository LibGen as “sketchy AF” before pulling millions of files to train models. Silicon Valley built a multi-billion-dollar valuation on the assumption that songwriters would simply accept digital scrapers gutting their catalogs. They miscalculated. The publishers are demanding a jury trial, an accounting of Claude's training data, and the destruction of all infringing copies.