Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic over Claude's lyrics.
The publishers filed suit in California, accusing Anthropic of pulling song lyrics from pirate archives to train Claude. The complaint names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and cofounder Benjamin Mann personally, not just the company. Sony and Warner Chappell are seeking up to $150,000 in damages per composition, a number that adds up fast across a catalog. It's the latest fight over how AI companies source the text they train on.
Naming executives personally is the notable part. It signals publishers want individual accountability for training-data decisions, not a settlement a company can absorb as a cost of doing business. The suit also follows a Munich court ruling from November 2025 finding that a model memorizing lyrics counts as reproduction, with the court signaling that text and data mining exceptions don't necessarily cover that outcome.
Anthropic markets itself as the safety-conscious AI lab. A finding that its own model memorized pirated lyrics would sit awkwardly next to that pitch.