Dario Amodei’s Anthropic is facing yet another massive legal challenge.
Sony Music and Warner, both juggernauts in the music publishing industry, filed a major lawsuit against the AI company late Friday night, accusing it of “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”
More specifically, the publishers said that Anthropic had, without permission, trained its AI models on “tens of thousands” of copyrighted compositions, asking for remuneration up to $150,000 per work, in addition to up to $25,000 for each time Anthropic intentionally stripped copyright data. As The Verge points out, that means damages could reach several billion dollars.
While the latest lawsuit is far from the first time a frontier AI lab has been accused of copyright infringement, this particular suit could be very difficult for Amodei and Anthropic to defend against. That’s because the suit names the exact same dataset of pirated works that Anthropic cofounder Benjamin Mann — who is listed as a defendant — was found to have illegally downloaded, culminating in the blockbuster $1.5 billion settlement in September 2025.
