Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed suit against Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann on August 29, 2026, alleging a “brazen campaign” of illegally training Claude on copyrighted songs. The publishers claim Anthropic pirated “tens of thousands” of music compositions from artists including The Beatles, Taylor Swift, and Michael Jackson through both pirate sources and licensed websites like Musixmatch. The lawsuit seeks up to 25,000 for each instance of copyright management information removal. Anthropic has stated it will defend itself “robustly,” citing fair use protections. This case is part of a broader wave of copyright litigation against AI companies from authors, publishers, music labels, and news outlets challenging AI training practices.