Sony Music and Warner just put Anthropic's two founders on the paperwork
A new lawsuit says Anthropic didn't just train on copyrighted music — it torrented millions of books to get it. And this time Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann are named personally.
Late Friday, Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and a group of other music publishers sued Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot. Their claim, in their own words: Anthropic ran a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works." The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and was first reported by Music Business Worldwide.
The unusual part isn't the accusation. It's the defendants. Alongside the company, the suit names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. Anthropic told TechCrunch: "We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court."
The publishers aren't arguing that a machine shouldn't be allowed to read. In the earlier Bartz v. Anthropic case, a judge ruled that using copyrighted works to train an AI was legal — but getting hold of that content through piracy was not. Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in that case. That ruling drew a line, and everyone with a catalogue has been walking along it ever since, looking for the same crack.
So the fight has quietly changed shape. It is no longer about what the model learned. It is about the download folder.
That's why this suit reaches for "flagrant piracy" through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books — including books that contain lyrics and sheet music. Sheet music inside a scanned book is a strange, almost accidental doorway, and the publishers walked right through it. Some of the same lawyers behind this filing also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a case filed in January, and led the Bartz case. This is not a fresh legal theory. It's a proven one being run again with a bigger claimant list.
And naming two founders personally does something a corporate lawsuit doesn't: it turns "the company scraped the internet" into "these two people decided to." We don't know how the court will treat that. But it changes who has to sit and explain.
Anyone who makes something that ends up on the internet — a song, a demo on SoundCloud, a self-published book, a set of guitar tabs, a course you sell for $9. The question of whether an AI company has to pay to obtain your work, rather than just to read it, is being decided in cases like this one, and you weren't invited. It also touches people at the other end: everyone building a career on top of Claude and tools like it — the freelancers, the students learning to code with a chatbot open in the next tab. The cost of the data those tools were trained on is still being tallied up, and $1.5 billion was only the first invoice.
Anthropic says it will defend itself in court, so watch for its formal response to this filing and for whether the judge here follows the Bartz logic — legal to train, illegal to pirate. Also watch the January case involving Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, run by some of the same lawyers. No hearing date, no ruling date, and no damages figure for this suit has been reported. Anyone giving you a timeline is guessing.
The publishers found their opening in something no one designed: song lyrics and sheet music sitting inside scanned books, swept up by the millions. Nobody torrenting a library was thinking about Warner Chappell. That's the thing about taking data quietly at scale — you don't get to choose whose lawyers come with it.
Sources: TechCrunch AI, "Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging a 'brazen campaign' of intellectual property theft," August 29, 2026 (reporting by Kirsten Korosec; case first reported by Music Business Worldwide).
После приговора на $1,5 млрд за пиратство к Anthropic выстроилась очередь: теперь крупнейшие музыкальные издатели требуют денег за скачанные торренты, и лично названы основатели компании — цена «бесплатных» данных, на которых учили ИИ, продолжает расти.
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