Sued for billions, Anthropic's co-founder allegedly torrented 5 million books

A copyright lawsuit against an AI company usually reads the same way: big claims, bigger numbers, a press statement. The one Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed against Anthropic has all of that, with a difference. It names Anthropic's co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, as individual defendants, and the damages number on the table could reach several billion dollars.

The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download more than five million pirated books, and that Anthropic employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. All of it, the publishers say, fed the development of Anthropic's Claude series of AI models, the same models the company is now pushing into enterprises through a partnership that put 30,000 Cognizant engineers on Claude, according to the Cognizant partnership report. The filing describes the effort as a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale," as The Verge reported.

Billions in damages, work by work

The publishers want damages for "tens of thousands" of copyrighted works. Each work could bring up to $150,000, and the complaint adds up to $25,000 more for every instance where identifiable copyright data was stripped from a file. Award the maximum on all of it, and the bill clears several billion dollars.

The songs named in the filing are recognizable:

The complaint also says Anthropic scraped lyrics from MusixMatch and LyricFind, services that had paid the labels for the right to license the same content.

Founders in the crosshairs

Naming individuals is a deliberate escalation. A copyright suit against a company is a cost of doing business: you settle, or you litigate, and you move on. A suit that puts the founders on the line for their own conduct is different, because the claim is about what those men did, not just about what their company trained on.

For Mann, the sharpest allegation is the five million pirated books pulled down over BitTorrent. Proven, that is not a mistake in the dataset-cleanup stage. It reads like a decision. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment, according to The Verge.

The mounting bill for training data

This is Anthropic's second major copyright reckoning in a short span. The company recently settled a suit brought by the publishing industry for $1.5 billion. It has also faced multiple lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO, plus separate suits from BMG and Round Hill Music. The works differ; the pattern does not. Anthropic has also been filling out its policy bench, most recently by naming a former California Supreme Court justice as its chief global affairs officer, a move that puts a former judge at the center of its AI policy.

The publishers frame this case in the starkest terms, calling the alleged conduct "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." That is a lawyer's summary, not a verdict. But the complaint's structure is what the industry will watch: per-work damages that scale with the size of a training corpus, a separate penalty for stripped copyright data, and founders answerable in their own names. The metadata claim matters beyond the money: strip the data that identifies a work and the infringement gets much harder to trace, which is why the complaint puts a separate price tag on it. Anthropic is also preparing invisible watermarks for future Claude models to satisfy EU AI Act rules, though a full rewrite can already erase them.

Win big, and the arithmetic changes for every lab that trained on lyrics or books without clearing rights. Lose, and the case still worked as a dry run for the claims that keep coming. Either way, the price of building a frontier model just got harder to forecast. Read the complaint as a price list and the point is simple: several billion dollars is what the publishers say the works that trained Claude are worth, and they have named the people they blame for taking them.