Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed suit against Anthropic in California federal court at the end of August 2026, accusing the company of using copyrighted song lyrics and sheet music to train its Claude models without authorization.
Reuters reported that the complaint alleges Anthropic obtained publishers’ lyrics and sheet music through torrent downloads, that Claude can reproduce copyrighted lyrics verbatim when prompted, and that the model was used to generate new AI lyrics that compete with licensed works. Named examples in coverage include repertoire tied to the Beatles, Taylor Swift and Michael Jackson. The publishers are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work and an injunction.
Anthropic’s response, also quoted by Reuters, called the filing a recycled theory from earlier cases and said the company will defend itself, arguing that training can qualify as fair use. The dispute lands in a crowded docket: Universal Music Group has already sued Anthropic over lyrics, and Anthropic previously settled a separate authors’ class action for $1.5 billion — a figure Sony and Warner’s complaint cites as too small to deter a company they describe as highly valued.
For songwriters and publishers, the case is another bid to force licensing into general-purpose AI pipelines. For AI labs, it is another test of whether courts will treat large-scale lyric ingestion as fair use or infringement. Neither side has yet had that question finally answered for music.
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