Sony and Warner's publishers sued Anthropic on Friday. The part that matters if you ship on Claude in Europe is not in the complaint.
On 28 August, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell affiliates filed in the Northern District of California — 5:26-cv-09217 — against Anthropic PBC, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally. The opening line calls it "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."
Two counts: copyright infringement, and removal of copyright management information under 17 U.S.C. 1202. Exposure runs to $150,000 per willfully infringed work and $25,000 per CMI violation. The Bartz settlement, approved 22 July 2026, paid roughly $3,000 a title.
Three things before you file this under "courts are banning AI training".
1. It is not about training. In Bartz, Judge Alsup held training on lawfully acquired books was quintessentially transformative and fair use. What was not was assembling a permanent central library out of pirated copies. This complaint is about acquisition — roughly five million books torrented from LibGen in June 2021, two million more from PiLiMi in July 2022, lyrics scraped from MusixMatch and LyricFind.
2. It is American litigation about American acts. Which is why the European half gets missed.
3. Recital 106 of the AI Act: a provider placing a general-purpose AI model on the Union market must have a copyright policy "regardless of the jurisdiction in which the copyright-relevant acts underpinning the training of those general-purpose AI models take place."
Article 53(1)(c) is that policy. Article 53(1)(d) is the public summary of training content, on the AI Office's template. Both apply since 2 August 2025 — and since 2 August 2026 the Commission can request documentation, evaluate models, and fine up to EUR 15m or 3% of worldwide turnover.
Monday:
1. Pull the 53(1)(d) training-content summary for every model in your stack. File it beside the model card. 2. Ask for the 53(1)(c) copyright policy in writing. Article 53(2) lifts (a) and (b) for open-weight models. It never lifts (c) or (d). 3. Put provenance and indemnity in the contract, not the incident review. 4. Diary 2 August 2027: models on the market before 2 August 2025 have until then.
A US court will spend years deciding what was taken. The Act only ever asked the provider what it can show.
What does your model's training summary actually say?
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