All Three Majors Are Now Suing Anthropic. The AI Copyright Endgame Is Taking Shape

When Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed their 48-page complaint against Anthropic in the Northern District of California, they didn't just add another lawsuit to the pile. They completed an encirclement: the publishing arms of all three major music companies are now litigating against the maker of Claude, over what the new complaint calls "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."

The anatomy of the new suit

Three things distinguish the Sony/Warner action from the dozens of AI copyright cases before it.

First, it names individuals. Alongside Anthropic itself, the complaint targets CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann personally — an escalation designed to pierce the corporate abstraction that has insulated executives from these disputes.

Second, it is precise about acquisition. The publishers allege a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading" — lyrics and sheet music obtained through pirate libraries like Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror, plus scraping of licensed lyric services Musixmatch and LyricFind. That framing is deliberate: courts have ruled training itself can be fair use, but piracy in acquisition is not. The publishers are aiming at the seam that already cost Anthropic $1.5 billion.

Third, the arithmetic. Up to $150,000 per infringed work, plus $25,000 per instance of stripped copyright management information, across tens of thousands of songs — with UMPG's parallel suit covering 20,000+ works and seeking over $3 billion. Combined exposure comfortably exceeds the book settlement.

The settlement precedent is doing double duty

The complaint leans heavily on Anthropic's September 2025 book settlement — and that is the strategic tell. The $1.5 billion deal, covering nearly 500,000 titles at roughly $3,000 each, established both a price and an admission-shaped precedent for pirated training data. Every subsequent plaintiff now negotiates against that anchor.

But the settlement's messy payout, which began this summer, is equally instructive. Authors are publicly fighting publishers claiming 100 percent of payments they were contractually owed half of, and claims on books whose rights reverted decades ago; literary agents — who hold no copyrights — are filing claims of their own. "WTF is HarperCollins playing at?" as author April Henry put it.

This chaos is a preview: any music resolution must divide money among labels, publishers, songwriters and performing rights organizations — a rights thicket that makes book publishing look tidy.

Where this converges

Follow the incentives and the endgame comes into focus. The majors do not want Anthropic dead; they want a rate. Anthropic — flush with $13 billion, walking away from acquisitions, eyeing an IPO — needs legal certainty more than it needs the marginal training tokens. A structured licensing regime, with per-work rates anchored to the book settlement and enforcement aimed at acquisition rather than training, would give both sides what they need.

The losers in that world are smaller AI labs that cannot afford the rates the majors set with Anthropic and OpenAI — and the newspapers, like the Seattle Times and Newsday this week, still litigating for a seat at the table where those rates get set. Copyright law was supposed to be AI's existential risk. It is turning into AI's cost of goods sold — and a moat for whoever can pay it.