AINEWS
The 48 page federal complaint in Northern California is the second major rights holder category to sue Anthropic in 2025, after a $1.5B authors settlement in September.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Music's Concord Music unit, along with other publisher units, sued Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, in federal court in Northern California late Friday, alleging the company ran "a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale" to train its Claude series of models. The 48-page complaint is the second major rights-holder category to take Anthropic to court over training data this year, after a $1.5 billion authors settlement in September.
The complaint names CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants alongside the company, and asks for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages per infringed work, according to the Yahoo Finance brief synced from Axios. The plaintiffs say Anthropic pirated thousands of copyrighted songs and lyrics. Anthropic was not immediately available to comment.
The music suit lands four months after the September 2025 authors settlement, the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history. The earlier case did not turn on whether Anthropic had downloaded copyrighted material; the parties disputed how the company had used it once it had. The music complaint goes further up the chain, alleging the company torrented and scraped the works in the first place.
Category by category, the structural cost of training frontier models is moving onto the labs' P&L. Authors and publishers in September. Songwriters and music publishers now. Visual artists, news outlets, and independent creators are lining up behind them. The question is no longer whether frontier labs will pay for training data; that question closed when the $1.5B authors settlement landed. The open question is how many categories will line up, in what order, and on what timetable.
The music publishers suing Anthropic today are descendants of the coalitions that pursued Napster, LimeWire, and Grokster in the 2000s. They are not new to structural fights with platform companies, and they have consistently preferred injunctive relief plus statutory damages over negotiated licenses. The complaint's per-work damages demand fits that pattern.
The September 2025 settlement capped authors' exposure at a known figure. The new complaint opens a second, structurally distinct front. If the plaintiffs can prove the "brazen campaign" of torrenting and scraping, not just unlicensed use of lawfully obtained material, the damages math widens, and the precedent reaches any lab that has handled training data at that scale.
The court, the Northern District of California, is the same venue that handled the authors case. The defendants, Amodei and Mann, are named individually, which signals that the plaintiffs are pursuing discovery into personal conduct, not just corporate practice.
Anthropic has not yet responded on the record. Its posture in the authors case was to settle without admitting the underlying conduct. The music publishers are betting that a court, not a class action, will force a different answer.
The next milestone is Anthropic's first filing, typically due 21 days after service. The $1.5B authors settlement landed eight months after the initial complaint. If the music case moves on a similar clock, a resolution before mid-2026 would put two major rights-holder categories on Anthropic's training-data ledger inside a single fiscal year.