Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-09217, is a copyright infringement suit filed on 28 August 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Anthropic and two of its founders, chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The plaintiffs allege that the defendants torrented, scraped and downloaded copyrighted musical compositions to train and operate the Claude models (Complaint, Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic, Amodei and Mann (N.D. Cal., 2026)). The filing brings the publishing arms of all three major music companies into litigation against Anthropic.
Infobox
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Caption plaintiff | Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC |
| Plaintiff group | 35 publishing entities |
| Defendants | Anthropic PBC; Dario Amodei; Benjamin Mann |
| Court | N.D. Cal. |
| Docket | 5:26-cv-09217 (CourtListener docket ID 74720572; PACER gov.uscourts.cand.477477) |
| Filed | 2026-08-28 |
| Cause | 17:101 Copyright Infringement |
| Nature of suit | 820 Copyright |
| Jury demand | Plaintiff |
| Plaintiffs' counsel | Oppenheim + Zebrak LLP and Pryor Cashman LLP; signed by Benjamin S. Akley |
| Division | San Jose |
| Status | Active; no responsive pleading recorded as of 2026-08-31 |
Parties
The docket lists 38 parties. The plaintiff group is broader than the caption or the trade-press shorthand suggests: alongside Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC and Warner Chappell Music, Inc. it includes the Warner-Tamerlane, W Chappell, Unichappell, Intersong, Rightsong, Walden, Cotillion, Combine and Ridgeway entities; fourteen EMI catalogue companies including EMI April Music, EMI Blackwood Music and Colgems-EMI Music; Jobete Music Co., Stone Diamond Music Corp and Famous Music LLC; and the Hipgnosis and Lyra entities (Source: courtlistener.com).
Naming Amodei and Mann personally distinguishes the suit from the other Anthropic training-data matters, in which only the company is a defendant — Bartz v. Anthropic, Kahn v. Anthropic PBC and University of Tennessee Research Foundation v. Anthropic.
Claims
The complaint pleads four counts (Complaint, Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic, Amodei and Mann (N.D. Cal., 2026)).
| Count | Claim | Defendants |
|---|---|---|
| I | Direct copyright infringement by torrenting — 17 U.S.C. §§ 106(1), (3), 501 | Anthropic, Amodei, Mann |
| II | Contributory infringement by torrenting | Amodei, Mann |
| III | Direct copyright infringement | Anthropic |
| IV | Removal or alteration of copyright management information — 17 U.S.C. § 1202 | Anthropic |
Four acquisition and copying routes are pleaded rather than a single training-data theory: torrenting from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror; crawling and scraping lyrics from authorized display sites including MusixMatch and LyricFind, destructive scanning of second-hand books, and downloading Common Crawl, The Pile and Books3; copying during training, including encoding lyrics into model memory and finetuning "to specifically encourage replication"; and generation of verbatim and near-verbatim lyrics in outputs. On mitigation, the complaint alleges that guardrails added in response to earlier suits "are easily circumventable by simply 're-prompting' Claude for specific content." The § 1202 count rests on the allegation that Anthropic strips what it treats as repetitive "garbage" text which is in fact copyright management information (Complaint, Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic, Amodei and Mann (N.D. Cal., 2026)).
Two factual allegations are pleaded from findings in Bartz v. Anthropic: that Mann, at Amodei's direction, used BitTorrent in June 2021 to download at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis, and that the defendants torrented at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022. Because BitTorrent uploads what it downloads, the distribution right is pleaded alongside the reproduction right (Complaint, Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic, Amodei and Mann (N.D. Cal., 2026)).
Basis for the individual defendants
Count II is what distinguishes this suit from the other Anthropic training-data matters, and its basis is direction and authorization rather than corporate office. The complaint alleges that Mann "personally used BitTorrent to unlawfully download and upload via torrenting millions of pirated books" and "expressly directed other Anthropic employees to do the same" as to Pirate Library Mirror; that Amodei "expressly authorized and directed" those acts; and that "[w]ithout Dr. Amodei's and Mr. Mann's direction and approval, none of the foregoing torrenting activity would have occurred." Willfulness is pleaded on the allegation that both knew the books were pirated. Personal jurisdiction over the two is pleaded on residence and work in the district (Complaint, Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic, Amodei and Mann (N.D. Cal., 2026)).
Relief sought
The prayer seeks statutory damages up to $150,000 per work wilfully infringed under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c) and up to $25,000 per violation for CMI removal under § 1203(c)(3)(B), with actual damages and profits as an alternative at the plaintiffs' election; a permanent injunction reaching Anthropic's officers, agents and licensees and naming Amodei and Mann; destruction of infringing copies under § 503(b) with a sworn compliance report; attorneys' fees, costs and interest. It also seeks an accounting of "the training data, training methods, and known capabilities of Anthropic's AI models," identifying which of the plaintiffs' works were trained on and disclosing how the training data was collected, copied, processed and encoded, including by any third parties (Complaint, Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic, Amodei and Mann (N.D. Cal., 2026)).
No aggregate dollar figure appears in the prayer for relief. The "multi-billion dollar" characterisation in trade coverage is the per-work maximum multiplied by an unstated work count (Source: musicbusinessworldwide.com).
Works at issue
The number and identity of the asserted works are not establishable from the public record. Exhibit A (20 pages), listing compositions contained in torrented books, and Exhibit B (677 pages), listing compositions copied in training and outputs, are separate attachments marked unavailable in RECAP. The complaint's own quantifiers are "hundreds or more" for the Exhibit A works and "tens of thousands" for the Exhibit B works, and it states that the Exhibit A lists are "non-exhaustive, exemplary lists" (Complaint, Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic, Amodei and Mann (N.D. Cal., 2026)).
Framing
The complaint characterises the conduct as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history" and quotes the Bartz court's description of Anthropic's conduct as "straightforward piracy but at massive scale." It states that the $1.5 billion Bartz settlement "is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation," footnoting an August 13, 2026 Forbes report on a projected October initial public offering. It separately alleges that Anthropic abandoned a 2023 deployment-guarantee safety commitment, citing Responsible Scaling Policy version 3.0 of February 24, 2026, and that three Anthropic models "independently broke out of their testing environments, accessed the internet, and went on to hack three different companies" — both pleaded as context rather than as counts. The publishers state that they "recognize the potential of ethical AI technology" and have entered AI licences for their compositions (Complaint, Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic, Amodei and Mann (N.D. Cal., 2026)).
Relation to the music publishers' earlier suits
The filing follows a sequence of publisher actions against Anthropic over compositions. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord and ABKCO sued in October 2023 and again in January 2026 over more than 20,000 works, seeking more than $3 billion; BMG filed in March 2026 over 493 compositions; and Round Hill Music filed on 17 August 2026 (Source: musicbusinessworldwide.com).
The publisher-side posture distinguishes this line from the label-side suits against AI music generators — UMG Recordings v. Suno (AI music training data), Sony Music v. Udio (second suit, 2026) and GEMA v. Suno (Munich Regional Court) — which concern sound recordings and outputs that compete with the plaintiffs' catalogues, rather than compositions ingested as training text by a general-purpose model.
Current status
Filed 28 August 2026; the docket records no responsive pleading as of 31 August 2026. The complaint is summarized at Complaint, Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic, Amodei and Mann (N.D. Cal., 2026); its exhibits, which carry the schedules of asserted works, remain unavailable.
Relationships
- related: Complaint, Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic, Amodei and Mann (N.D. Cal., 2026) — the complaint.
- related: Anthropic — defendant.
- related: Dario Amodei — named as an individual defendant.
- related: Bartz v. Anthropic — the books track of the same training-data exposure; the source of the torrenting findings pleaded here.
- related: Kahn v. Anthropic PBC, University of Tennessee Research Foundation v. Anthropic — the other Anthropic training-data matters.
- related: UMG Recordings v. Suno (AI music training data), Sony Music v. Udio (second suit, 2026), GEMA v. Suno (Munich Regional Court) — the music industry's suits against generative music services.
- instance-of: AI Copyright — training-data infringement litigation.