Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Sued Anthropic, Amodei and Mann Personally Over Torrented Training Data
On 2026-08-28 Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann, alleging mass torrenting and scraping of copyrighted lyrics and removal of copyright management information. Named works include "Eye of the Tiger," "All I Want for Christmas Is You," "Hallelujah" and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings"; the four counts include contributory infringement pleaded against the two founders individually. Damages sought run to $150,000 per infringed work plus $25,000 per CMI removal across tens of thousands of works, which is a procurement-risk data point for every SaaS vendor that just embedded Claude in its product this month.
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