Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic for Copyright Infringement on Tens of Thousands of Songs; Claims May Reach Tens of Billions of Dollars
Source：
fortune.com
According to Fortune, Sony Music and Warner Chappell Music filed a joint lawsuit against Anthropic on September 1, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that the company illegally downloaded, scraped, and seeded tens of thousands of copyrighted songs—including "Hallelujah," "I Am the Walrus," and "Cruel Summer"—to train its AI model, Claude. The defendants also include CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic improperly scraped lyrics and sheet music via pirated channels such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, as well as authorized lyric platforms like Musixmatch and LyricFind, incorporating them into Claude’s training data. The two music companies seek up to $150,000 per infringed song and up to $25,000 per instance of removing copyright management information, covering "thousands to tens of thousands" of works, with total claims potentially reaching into the billions of dollars. Anthropic denies the allegations, stating it will "vigorously defend itself," and cites the ruling in Bartz v. Anthropic, arguing that using copyrighted works to train
