Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic, naming Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic on August 28, 2026, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint calls the company’s use of their songs one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history, and it names co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants alongside the company.

That last part is what separates this filing from the ones before it.

What Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed on August 28

The complaint was brought by Oppenheim + Zebrak LLP, the lead counsel on the Concord and Universal case against Anthropic, together with Pryor Cashman LLP. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell lead the case, and a group of affiliated publishers joined them on the filing. They demanded a jury trial.

Statutory damages are a fixed range Congress set for copyright cases, so a rightsholder can collect without proving exactly how much money they lost. At up to $150,000 per work, the arithmetic depends entirely on how many compositions the court counts.

The complaint names specific songs: “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, “All I Want for Christmas is You”, “Eye of the Tiger”, “Here Comes Santa Claus” and “Paper Rings”. It describes the full scope as “thousands upon thousands” of the publishers’ copyrighted musical compositions.

Why Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann are named as individual defendants

Suing a company is routine. Suing the people who run it is not, and the complaint spends its energy explaining why it does both.

“Dr. Amodei and Mr. Mann are personally liable for their respective roles in this illegal torrenting of pirated copies of Music Publishers’ works from LibGen and PiLiMi,” the complaint states.

That is an allegation, not a finding. No court has ruled on it. The claim did not appear from nowhere, though: my earlier coverage of the move to kill the torrenting claim against Amodei in the Concord case shows Anthropic has already fought this exact theory once.

The LibGen and PiLiMi torrenting allegations behind all four counts

The suit brings four counts. Direct infringement by torrenting runs against all three defendants. Contributory infringement by torrenting, which means helping someone else infringe, runs against Amodei and Mann. Two more counts run against Anthropic alone: direct infringement, and removal or alteration of copyright management information, the credit and ownership data attached to a work.

The underlying allegations concern how the training data was collected. The complaint says that in June 2021 Mann used BitTorrent, a file-sharing protocol, to download at least 5 million pirated books from Library Genesis, and that Anthropic employees torrented at least 2 million more from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022. Sheet music and lyrics sit inside those book collections.

Both figures come from findings in Bartz v. Anthropic, the authors’ case in which a judge in the same district described the conduct as “straightforward piracy but at massive scale.”

The filing also quotes internal Anthropic material unsealed in Bartz, including Mann describing LibGen as “sketchy AF” and the company’s own Archive Team calling it a “blatant violation of copyright.”

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Despite branding itself as the 'ethical AI company,' Anthropic has repeatedly acted in ways that belie that image, prioritizing competitive advantage over compliance with the law.

On the $1.5 billion the company agreed to pay in the authors’ case, the publishers wrote that Anthropic “clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business,” and that the sum “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.” The filing attributes that valuation to an August 2026 Forbes report on a projected October IPO. I have not verified the figure independently, and it is the publishers’ characterisation, not a court finding.

Anthropic now faces five publisher lawsuits at once

Sony and Warner Chappell were the last two majors holding back. Their filing means every major publisher is now in court against the same defendant.

I’m tracking this filing in my Sony and Warner Chappell v. Anthropic case tracker, and the two oldest suits in the Concord v. Anthropic tracker. The $3 billion sheet music suit and the Round Hill filing have their own coverage, as does the $1.5 billion authors’ settlement the publishers cite.

What the Sony and Warner Chappell complaint asks the court to order

Beyond damages, the publishers want every infringing copy destroyed and a full account of what went into Claude’s training data. That second request is the one with teeth, because it would put the contents of a frontier model’s training set on the record.

The complaint is careful to say the publishers are not against the technology. They write that they “recognize the potential of ethical AI technology” and have already signed licences permitting authorised use of their compositions with AI, a point that matches the industry-wide deals the NMPA signed with Udio and Klay.

“Even the most revolutionary of technologies must develop within the bounds of the law,” the filing concludes, “and Anthropic’s Claude models are no different.”

Anthropic has already answered in public. “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch on August 29.

Its formal answer, when it lands, will show whether it fights the personal liability theory again or takes a different route this time.