Afternoon Brief, August 30th 2026

Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic, and name Dario Amodei personally

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed suit against Anthropic late Friday in the Northern District of California, naming CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants alongside the company. The complaint accuses Anthropic of "a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale," and gets specific about method: BitTorrent downloads from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror in 2021 and 2022, scraping of the licensed lyric platforms MusixMatch and LyricFind, and use of the Books3, Common Crawl and The Pile training sets. It names songs directly, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "Eye of the Tiger," "Livin' on a Prayer" and "Uptown Funk" among them, and puts "tens of thousands" of compositions at up to $150,000 each in statutory damages plus $25,000 per stripped copyright-management tag, a multi-billion-dollar exposure before a jury hears a word of it. The filing leans hard on Anthropic's own record: the company paid $1.5 billion last September to book authors over the same torrenting method, and agreed to output guardrails after a 2023 suit from Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO. This complaint calls those guardrails "easily circumventable by simply 're-prompting,'" which makes the case a direct test of whether that earlier settlement changed anything or just moved the argument. SourcesAB