Top Music Publishers Sue AI Company Fresh Off $1.5 Billion Settlement for ‘Blatant Theft’
Top Music Publishers Sue AI Company Fresh Off $1.5 Billion Settlement for ‘Blatant Theft’
Zachary LeemanSat, August 29, 2026 at 7:05 PM UTC
0
Screenshot via Anthropic YouTube
Sony Music and Warner Music claim AI company Anthropic engaged in “blatant theft” of their intellectual property, according to a lawsuit.
Anthropic is allegedly behind “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history,” the companies claimed in a lawsuit filed late Friday.
Anthropic used thousands of hours of copyrighted music to train its AI models, according to the legal filing which was first reported on by Axios and includes Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.
This is far from the first legal action taken against AI companies amid the technology’s rapid growth, but it is one of the most broad, and could result in a years-long legal battle.
According to Sony and Warner, Anthropic illegally downloaded and shared their material, and they are seeking damages for every piece of material that was taken.
“Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ series of artificial intelligence (‘AI’) models,” according to court papers.
Advertisement
Anthropic is fresh off agreeing to pay $1.5 billion after a group of authors complained their work had been illegally taken and used. Anthropic agreed to pay $3,000 each for thousands of materials used. A judge approved that settlement last month.
“This landmark settlement will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history,” the settlement motion reads.
That lawsuit was filed by nonfiction authors Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, as well as thriller writer Andrea Bartz. The authors accused Anthropic of using their materials without permissions to train AI language models.
The company has also been involved in a legal battle with the Pentagon. A federal judge ruled this week in Anthropic’s favor, saying the government acted illegally when punishing the company for being an alleged supply chain risk.
President Donald Trumpraged at Anthropic in March after they refused to give full access to their technology to the Pentagon.
The post Top Music Publishers Sue AI Company Fresh Off $1.5 Billion Settlement for ‘Blatant Theft’ first appeared on Mediaite.
Source: “AOL Money”
