AINEWS
Sony and Warner Chappell sue the AI lab behind Claude, weeks before its reported $2 trillion October listing, over the alleged use of tens of thousands of songs in training.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a federal copyright complaint against Anthropic, the AI lab behind the Claude chatbot, in California on Friday, asking a jury to award statutory damages across tens of thousands of songs. It is the fifth major music-side action against the same company in under three years, and it lands weeks before Anthropic's reported $2 trillion October public listing.
The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and first reported by Music Business Worldwide, accuses Anthropic of systematically copying publishers' lyrics to train Claude. According to the filing, Anthropic allegedly downloaded millions of pirated books from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, two well-known pirate repositories, via torrenting networks, then scraped lyrics directly from licensed services including MusixMatch and LyricFind. The publishers identify specific compositions among the works at issue: "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "All I Want for Christmas Is You," "Eye of the Tiger," and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings."
The damages ceiling runs into the billions. Publishers are seeking the Copyright Act's statutory maximum of $150,000 per infringed work, plus $25,000 per instance of removed or altered copyright-management information. With tens of thousands of compositions allegedly in play, the math reaches the maximum at scale, though the complaint does not allege that Anthropic actually distributed infringing copies at that level. The ceiling is what a jury could award per work, not an alleged damages total.
Beyond the damages ceiling, the new complaint adds a specific allegation: that the guardrails Anthropic installed after settling a separate class action with authors for $1.5 billion in September 2025 are trivially bypassable. The September settlement resolved claims over a separate corpus of training material, not the publishers' lyrics. According to the new complaint, the post-settlement safety features meant to keep Claude from regurgitating copyrighted lyrics can be defeated by re-prompting the model until it produces them anyway. The publishers describe a process in which a user asks Claude for a song, is refused, edits the request, and receives the lyrics on a subsequent attempt, a workaround, they argue, that reduces the settlement's protection to a speed bump.
The new filing sits at the end of a three-year queue of music-side actions against the same lab. Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO sued Anthropic in October 2023. A second suit from the same group followed in January 2026, seeking more than $3 billion for 20,000-plus works. BMG filed in March 2026, Round Hill Music in July. The same legal team that led the earlier UMG/Concord cases is representing the new plaintiffs. Each complaint has alleged some combination of training-data piracy and output regurgitation. The new Sony/Warner Chappell complaint goes further by name-checking the post-settlement guardrails and arguing they fail at the user interface.
Anthropic is reported to be preparing an October initial public offering at a $2 trillion valuation, a figure cited in the new complaint and attributed to a Forbes projection. If the listing proceeds on that timeline, the company will become the first frontier AI lab to price itself in public markets while sitting on a documented pattern of music-industry copyright exposure and a nine-figure author settlement already on the books.
For most of the past three years, the music industry's copyright claims against generative-AI labs have read as a slow-moving crisis: discrete lawsuits, individual settlements, no public-market pressure. The Sony/Warner Chappell filing changes the timing, not the substance. It puts a known, recurring line item in front of public-offering investors who have not previously had to price it in.
Anthropic has not yet filed a public response to the new complaint. A jury trial has been demanded. The court's calendar will determine whether the case reaches trial before the listing closes, after it, or settles along the way.