AI Music Digest

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a copyright suit against Anthropic on Friday, August 28, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint names the company alongside co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants, and runs to four counts: direct infringement through torrenting, contributory infringement against Amodei and Mann, direct infringement against Anthropic, and removal or alteration of copyright management information.

The publishers allege what they call a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale” to train Claude — specifically, that Anthropic torrented roughly seven million pirated books from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, scraped lyrics from licensed sites including Musixmatch and LyricFind, drew on training datasets including Common Crawl, The Pile and Books3, and that Claude reproduces lyrics verbatim in its outputs. Compositions named in the filing include “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Hallelujah,” “Livin’ On a Prayer,” “September,” “Uptown Funk” and “Paper Rings.” The complaint identifies “tens of thousands” of allegedly infringed works and seeks up to $150,000 for each willfully infringed work plus up to $25,000 for each instance of copyright-management-information removal — which, at that scale, is a claim in the billions. The publishers characterise the conduct as “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history,” and take aim at the company’s positioning: “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.”

These are allegations, and none has been tested. An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch: “We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.” The backdrop is Bartz v. Anthropic, the authors’ case the company settled for $1.5 billion, in which the court distinguished between training on copyrighted material — which it treated as potentially lawful — and acquiring that material through piracy, which it did not. That distinction is what this complaint is built around. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic in October 2023 and again in January 2026; BMG followed in March 2026 and Round Hill Music in August.

Why It Matters: Publishers control compositions and lyrics — the text an LLM ingests most directly. With Sony and Warner Chappell joining Universal’s arm, every major publisher is now suing Anthropic, and all of them are litigating acquisition rather than training.

The Korean Music Copyright Association, the country’s dominant collecting society, voted at its eighth board meeting on August 25 to withdraw the amendments it had adopted at the start of the month. Announced on August 3, those amendments had ended KOMCA’s blanket ban on registering AI-assisted music, allowing works where a human “substantially and primarily” participated in the writing, composition or arrangement, subject to mandatory disclosure of which AI tools were used and royalty holdbacks for false filings. All of that is now rescinded. Works already registered under the short-lived rule face cancellation procedures at the applicant’s request, and pending applications are suspended until new standards exist.

The reversal followed direct political and government pressure. Rep. Kim Jae-won — a former singer who performed as Lia — held a National Assembly press conference on August 10 arguing that no social consensus or legislative conclusion had been reached, and that a single organisation should not set the standard unilaterally. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism then sent KOMCA an official letter on August 18 saying broader discussion across the cultural sector had to come first. KOMCA chairman Lee Si-ha told Kyunghyang Shinmun the association agrees “that sufficient discussion across the cultural sector must precede any standard that everyone can accept.” KOMCA says the withdrawal does not end the AI discussion, and the ban on wholly AI-generated works was never in question either way. As of this writing, no English-language music trade appears to have reported the reversal, though several covered the original rule change.

Why It Matters: It cuts against the direction of travel — ASCAP, BMI and SOCAN have accepted partially AI-generated works since October 2025. Korea granted the same and took it back in three weeks, on the argument that a collecting society should not set AI copyright policy before legislators do.