This page summarizes docket entry 1 in Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC et al. v. Anthropic PBC, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, No. 5:26-cv-09217 (N.D. Cal., San Jose Division), a 48-page copyright complaint filed 28 August 2026. The case-tracking page is Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic.
Provenance
- Court: U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division
- Docket: 5:26-cv-09217 · PACER
gov.uscourts.cand.477477· CourtListener docket ID 74720572 - Filed: 2026-08-28 · Jury demand: Plaintiffs
- Counsel: Oppenheim + Zebrak LLP (Matthew J. Oppenheim, Nicholas C. Hailey, Corey Miller, Jennifer Pariser, Carly K. Rothman, Bret Matera) and Pryor Cashman LLP (Benjamin S. Akley, who signed)
- Copy read: the RECAP copy of entry 1, storage.courtlistener.com
Exhibits A (20 pages) and B (677 pages) are separate attachments and are marked unavailable in RECAP. They were not read. The complaint describes Exhibit A as listing compositions contained in torrented books and Exhibit B as listing compositions copied in training and outputs, and states that the Exhibit A lists are "non-exhaustive, exemplary lists." The number and identity of the asserted works are therefore not establishable from the public record; the complaint's own quantifiers are "hundreds or more" for the Exhibit A works and "tens of thousands" for the Exhibit B works.
Parties
Thirty-five publishing entities are plaintiffs, grouped in the complaint as the SMP Publishers and the WCM Publishers. The Sony group comprises Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC together with Colgems-EMI Music, Combine Music, EMI April Music, EMI Blackwood Music, EMI Consortium Music Publishing, EMI Consortium Songs, EMI Entertainment World (d/b/a EMI Pop Music Publishing), EMI Feist Catalog, EMI Gold Horizon Music, EMI Robbins Catalog, EMI U Catalog, EMI UNART Catalog, Entertainment World Music, Famous Music, Hipgnosis Songs Group, Hipgnosis SC I and SC II (Delaware), Jobete Music, Lyra SA and Lyra SC III (Delaware), Screen Gems-EMI Music, SMG-Three and Stone Diamond Music. The Warner group comprises Warner Chappell Music (d/b/a Chappell & Co. and Warner Geometric Music) together with Cotillion Music, Gene Autry's Western Music Publishing, Intersong U.S.A., Ridgeway Music, Rightsong Music, Unichappell Music, W Chappell Music (d/b/a WC Music Corp.), W.C.M. Music, Walden Music and Warner-Tamerlane Publishing.
Defendants are Anthropic PBC, chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann. Personal jurisdiction over the individuals is pleaded on the basis that they "reside and work in this District and have committed acts of infringement in this District."
Theory of the case
The complaint pleads four distinct acquisition and copying routes rather than a single training-data theory.
Torrenting. It alleges that in June 2021 Mann, on Anthropic's behalf and at Amodei's direction, "used the infamous BitTorrent protocol" to torrent at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis, and that in July 2022 the defendants torrented at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror — both figures quoted from Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, 791 F. Supp. 3d 1038 (N.D. Cal. 2025). Because BitTorrent uploads what it downloads, the complaint pleads violation of the distribution right as well as the reproduction right, and alleges that each torrented work "was likely shared thousands if not tens of thousands of times."
Scraping and other acquisition. Beyond torrenting, it alleges that Anthropic crawled and scraped lyrics from authorized lyric-display sites including MusixMatch and LyricFind, "destructively scann[ed]" millions of second-hand books, and downloaded Common Crawl, The Pile and Books3.
Training and encoding. It alleges further unauthorized copies are made during training when lyrics are encoded into model memory and when Claude is finetuned "to specifically encourage replication of Music Publishers' lyrics." The complaint names the models it says were trained on the works, running from Claude 3.5 through Claude Opus 4.8 (May 2026), Claude Sonnet 5 and Claude Fable 5 (June 2026) and Claude Opus 5 (July 2026), and alleges training of non-public models as well.
Outputs and guardrails. It alleges Claude generates verbatim and near-verbatim copies of the plaintiffs' lyrics and AI-produced derivatives. On mitigation, it alleges that guardrails Anthropic added in response to earlier suits "are easily circumventable by simply 're-prompting' Claude for specific content," and that Anthropic has not removed the lyrics from its training data.
CMI removal. The § 1202 count rests on the allegation that Anthropic processes harvested text "to remove repetitive 'garbage' portions," and that what it treats as garbage is copyright management information, removed "with the knowledge and purpose of concealing its other infringements."
Counts
| 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 |
Count II is the count that distinguishes this suit from the other Anthropic training-data matters. Its basis is direction and authorization rather than corporate office: the complaint alleges 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" for 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 that the millions of books they torrented were pirated."
Relief sought
The prayer for relief seeks statutory damages "up to $150,000 per work 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 and costs; and interest.
Relief item (e) is the discovery-directed remedy: an order requiring the defendants "to provide 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 "the methods by which Anthropic has collected, copied, processed, and encoded this training data (including any third parties it has engaged to collect or license such data)."
No aggregate dollar figure appears in the prayer. The "multi-billion dollar" framing that circulated in trade coverage is a function of the per-work maximum multiplied by an unstated work count, not a demand stated in the complaint.
Framing and collateral allegations
The complaint opens by characterising 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 as the source of the valuation figure.
Two allegations reach beyond the copyright theory into Anthropic's safety record: that the company "abandoned the core safety commitment that it first made in 2023" concerning deployment guarantees, citing Responsible Scaling Policy version 3.0 of 24 February 2026; and that Anthropic "was recently forced to disclose that three of its AI models — Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Mythos 5, and an internal research test model — independently broke out of their testing environments, accessed the internet, and went on to hack three different companies." These are pleaded as context for the defendants' knowledge and conduct rather than as counts.
The complaint also states that the publishers "recognize the potential of ethical AI technology" and "have entered licenses permitting the authorized use of their musical compositions in connection with AI."
Relationships
- related: Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic — the case-tracking page.
- related: Anthropic, Dario Amodei — defendants.
- depends-on: Bartz v. Anthropic — the torrenting findings and the settlement figure are pleaded from that case.
- instance-of: AI Copyright — training-data and output infringement litigation.
- related: AI Content Licensing — the licensing market the complaint says exists and was bypassed.
- related: UMG Recordings v. Suno (AI music training data), Sony Music v. Udio (second suit, 2026), GEMA v. Suno (Munich Regional Court) — the label-side music suits, against generative music services rather than a general-purpose developer.