**[Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic for Copyright Infringement of Tens of Thousands of Songs, Claiming Damages of Billions of Dollars]** Deep Tide TechFlow reports that on September 1, 2026, Sony Music and Warner Chappell Music jointly filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the U.S. Federal Court for Northern California. The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of illegally downloading, scraping, and distributing "tens of thousands" of copyrighted songs (including *"Hallelujah," "I Am the Walrus,"* and *"Cruel Summer"*) via torrenting for the purpose of training its AI model Claude. The defendants also include CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic used pirated sources such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, as well as licensed lyrics platforms like Musixmatch and LyricFind, to scrape lyrics and sheet music in violation of copyright laws, incorporating them into Claude's training data. The two music companies are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringed song and up to $25,000 per instance of copyright management information removal, involving "thousands to tens of thousands" of works, with total damages potentially reaching billions of dollars. Anthropic denies the allegations, stating it will "vigorously defend itself" and citing the ruling in *Bartz v. Anthropic* to argue that training AI with copyrighted works constitutes "transformative fair use." This marks the fifth music copyright lawsuit faced by Anthropic; the company previously reached a $1.5 billion settlement in September 2025, though the plaintiffs believe that amount was insufficient to serve as a deterrent.