AI Markets: Anthropic sued, SpaceX at war on every front

Anthropic takes its first big lawsuit just as it gears up for its IPO, while SpaceX is fighting both OpenAI over AI coding and a power shortage for its compute centers. Elsewhere, the courts are wading into the AI data center debate, and South Korea is looking to Japan to secure its memory production.

Sony and Warner go after Anthropic weeks before its IPO

The world’s two biggest music publishers accuse Anthropic of plundering their catalogs to train Claude. The complaint lands at a sensitive moment: the startup is preparing its public IPO filing, with a valuation reportedly around $2 trillion.

Key points:

  • Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed suit on August 28 in federal court in Northern California against Anthropic, its CEO Dario Amodei and its cofounder Benjamin Mann, both named personally.
  • The complaint denounces a “brazen campaign of mass downloading, scraping and piracy” covering tens of thousands of musical compositions.
  • The publishers are asking for a jury trial and seeking up to $150,000 per pirated work, plus $25,000 per removal of copyright management information.
  • In 2025, Anthropic already paid the largest settlement in the history of US copyright law, $1.5 billion, for pirating books.

What the complaint says

According to TechCrunch and Music Business Worldwide, Sony and Warner accuse Anthropic of illegally “torrenting,” scraping and downloading copyrighted lyrics and sheet music to feed Claude, without ever obtaining a license. An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch the company disputes the allegations and plans to defend itself in court. The suit joins a separate action already brought by Universal Music: the world’s three biggest record companies are now lined up against the same opponent, which changes the scale of the case.

This new lawsuit doesn’t start from scratch: in September 2025, a federal judge had already ruled that training an AI on copyrighted texts could be legal, but that obtaining those texts through piracy was not. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a similar suit from book authors and publishers — a precedent that gives a sense of the size of the financial risks at stake.

One more risk in the IPO file

Anthropic is aiming to publicly file its S-1 after Labor Day, with a listing hoped for this fall. A mass infringement lawsuit, with statutory damages that can climb fast depending on how many works are found to be pirated, is exactly the kind of legal risk investors will try to put a number on before buying into the IPO. This is neither a ruling nor proof: these are allegations, which Anthropic disputes. But the timing — one more lawsuit opening right before the public roadshow — adds uncertainty to a file already under scrutiny over its ability to deliver on its growth promises. For a European investor, Anthropic will in any case only be available through a regular brokerage account, outside a PEA, like most upcoming US tech listings.

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SpaceX fights two battles at once: against OpenAI, and against the power shortage

In the space of two days, SpaceX found itself at the center of two very different stories: a commercial breakup with OpenAI over its coding tool Cursor, and the reveal of a secret foundry meant to solve one of AI’s bottlenecks, the supply of gas turbines.

Key points:

  • OpenAI announced on August 29 that it will cut off Cursor’s access to its models on November 12, following SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, completed on August 14.
  • OpenAI’s stated reason: it cannot “trust” SpaceX to respect its terms of use, based on “the track record of Elon Musk’s companies in breaking contracts.”
  • Musk fired back on X, calling Sam Altman and Greg Brockman “absolutely untrustworthy,” reigniting a years-old feud.
  • Meanwhile, Musk confirmed that SpaceX is building a private gas turbine blade foundry in Texas to speed up power generation for its AI compute centers.

OpenAI pulls the plug on Cursor as the Musk-Altman war escalates

According to CNBC and OpenAI itself, access to GPT models through Cursor will end on November 12. Cursor’s chief, Michael Truell, downplayed the immediate business impact: OpenAI models reportedly account for only about 5% of the tool’s user traffic, and developers will still be able to use them with their own API key. Cursor’s ARR hit about $3 billion at the end of April, with a projection of more than $6 billion by year-end. The episode is part of a conflict that has been out in the open since 2024, when Musk sued OpenAI, Altman and Brockman after having left the board in 2018. For SpaceX, losing access to OpenAI models in its new coding tool isn’t fatal, but it shows the price to pay, in severed technology dependencies, for pulling a startup into the orbit of a shareholder as polarizing as Musk.

A private furnace to get around the turbine shortage

According to TechCrunch, SpaceX bought about 830 acres near Bastrop, Texas, between March and June to build a foundry that can cast the blades for its gas turbines itself — a component so technically delicate (single crystal, vacuum furnace) that it is now a global bottleneck for anyone who wants to power a data center quickly. Musk claims this could cut commissioning times by 18 months. The stakes are real: in Memphis, the NAACP is already suing xAI (part of the Musk ecosystem) for running dozens of gas turbines without emissions permits near residential areas. Wanting to control the whole chain, from chip to turbine, reduces a supply risk but exposes SpaceX more to the environmental lawsuits already hitting its cousins in the Musk group.

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AI data centers: the courts step in in New Mexico

Until now, opposition to AI data centers in the United States mostly took the form of protests, petitions and PR campaigns by the operators. In New Mexico, it’s now the state’s highest court that is putting a giant project built by Oracle for OpenAI on hold.

Key points:

  • Overnight from August 23 to 24, the New Mexico Supreme Court suspended two permitting proceedings tied to “Project Jupiter,” Oracle’s data center campus for OpenAI in Doña Ana County.
  • Frozen: the hearing on the air quality permit for the site’s natural gas fuel cell system, and the practice of authorizing the use of a specific water well for construction.
  • The suspension follows challenges from environmental groups denouncing Oracle’s lack of transparency on the project’s environmental effects and power consumption.
  • The project, valued at $165 billion, could emit more greenhouse gases than Albuquerque, Las Cruces and Santa Fe combined, according to estimates cited by local media.

What the Court actually suspended

According to Source NM and Food & Water Watch, the nine justices ruled unanimously on two separate petitions: one temporarily freezes the air regulator’s hearing on the natural gas fuel cell system planned for the site; the other orders the State Engineer’s office to suspend its practice of authorizing water withdrawals from a specific well for the construction project. This is not a cancellation of the project but a procedural pause, while the Court rules on the merits of the transparency complaints brought by the groups. Oracle has not yet prevailed on either front, which delays the construction timeline accordingly.

Why it matters for investors

Project Jupiter is one of the big projects feeding Oracle’s giant order book ($638 billion in contracted revenue, half of it tied to OpenAI). Until now, the holdups documented by specialist firms involved locally negotiated delays, not intervention by a state’s highest court. This precedent opens the door to other state supreme courts being asked to weigh in on other contested projects elsewhere in the United States, adding a timing risk — and therefore a financial one — that is hard to model for data center operators and their shareholders. Neither Oracle nor the sector’s other big names (Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet) are eligible for a PEA; European exposure goes through a brokerage account or a UCITS ETF tracking US or tech stocks.

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AI memory: SK Hynix looks to Japan to keep up the pace

Just as Nvidia has flagged memory as a brake on its own growth, the world’s number one HBM memory maker is studying building a plant in Japan — a first for a South Korean manufacturer of its size.

Key points:

  • SK Hynix is studying the feasibility of a joint venture to build a memory chip plant in Japan, with Miyagi Prefecture as the likely site.
  • The investment could reach tens of trillions of won; the company says no decision has been made yet.
  • CEO Kwak Noh-jung talked in late August about stronger cooperation with Japan’s semiconductor equipment and materials ecosystem.
  • The stated goal is to increase production of HBM and NAND chips for AI and ease what is seen as a global memory shortage.

Why Japan, why now

According to DigiTimes and KED Global, the Tohoku region, home to Miyagi, already has a high concentration of semiconductor equipment and materials suppliers, available electricity and a skilled industrial workforce. SK Hynix, which holds 50 to 60% of the global HBM memory market and was the first company to mass-produce these chips for Nvidia accelerators, is looking to diversify its production outside South Korea while moving closer to Japanese customers and suppliers. If the project goes ahead, it would be the first large-scale manufacturing investment by a Korean chipmaker on Japanese soil.

The link with the shortage Nvidia just pointed to

When it released its results on August 26, Nvidia explained that its actual demand already exceeded its growth forecast, even after raising it to about 70% for fiscal 2028, held back in particular by memory supply constraints. SK Hynix’s move fits squarely into that context: adding HBM and NAND capacity to ease a bottleneck that currently constrains the entire AI chain, from chip foundries to hyperscalers. Nothing is signed, and the company itself urges caution on the timeline. For a European investor, SK Hynix, listed in Seoul, remains outside the PEA; indirect exposure goes through a global semiconductor UCITS ETF, where the Korean weighting is generally a minority.

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Edition prepared by our monitoring agent (data and sources as of Monday, August 31, 2026), reviewed under our editorial policy. General information, not investment advice: investing carries a risk of capital loss.