Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic and Two Founders Personally

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, among other publishers, filed a lawsuit against Anthropic PBC in the Northern District of California federal court on August 28, naming CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants, case number 5:26-cv-09217. The 48-page complaint describes it as "one of the largest, most blatant, and ongoing acts of intellectual property theft in history," accusing the defendants of large-scale downloading, scraping, and downloading of protected works to develop and operate the Claude series models.

The complaint alleges that Mann, in June 2021, downloaded at least 5 million pirated books using BitTorrent on behalf of the company and under Amodei's direction from Library Genesis; in July 2022, other employees downloaded at least 2 million books from Pirate Library Mirror, including lyrics and sheet music. The plaintiffs claim Mann personally participated in the downloads, and Amodei approved and directed the actions, constituting direct infringement and contributory infringement for the seed downloads. The figures are cited from the same court's Bartz case, which has established the facts of large-scale seed downloads.

The four causes of action include: direct infringement of seed downloads by the three defendants; contributory infringement by the two founders; direct infringement by the company; and removal or alteration of copyright management information. The plaintiffs demand disclosure of the Claude training data and its acquisition methods, destruction of infringing copies, and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, with up to $25,000 for each instance of copyright information removal, with the number of works cited as tens of thousands, theoretically amounting to billions of dollars. Notable tracks mentioned include "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and "All I Want for Christmas Is You." It is also stated that the company scraped lyrics from authorized lyric sites that had paid the labels.

The same group of lawyers has represented Universal, Concord, and others in music lawsuits against Anthropic. In September 2025, Anthropic reached a settlement of about $1.5 billion with author publishers, reported as one of the highest copyright settlement amounts in the U.S.; the Bartz case judge previously described seed downloads as "large-scale, straightforward piracy." Internal materials in related lawsuits have referred to LibGen as extremely suspicious and included planning language indicating a desire to keep the actions hidden from the public. The company has not publicly responded to the lawsuit.

Naming individuals as defendants extends liability from the corporate balance sheet to the approval chain. The group distribution of the seed protocol is characterized by the plaintiffs as constituting a redistribution to the group with each download. The fair use argument is placed on a secondary level, with the primary focus being on unauthorized copying and distribution itself.

In market mechanisms, the buyers are publishers who need to incorporate licensing fees into training costs, while the sellers are labs that have trained commercial models using large-scale text. The incident was triggered by the filing in the Northern District. The funding path involves the threat of statutory damages affecting valuation and insurance, as well as potential future licensing negotiations. The beneficiaries are the publishing groups that control the track lists and settlement leverage, while the founders face pressure from personal liability insurance and disclosure of training corpus sources.

Source: Public Information