A group of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group is suing Anthropic. They allege the company illegally downloaded more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, lyrics, and musical compositions.
In a statement on Wednesday, the publishers said the damages could exceed $3 billion. If successful, this would become one of the largest non-class action copyright cases in U.S. history.
This new lawsuit was filed by the same legal team from the Bartz v. Anthropic case. In that previous case, a group of authors accused the AI company of using their copyrighted books to train products like Claude. Judge William Alsup ruled that while it is legal for Anthropic to train its models on copyrighted content, it was not legal for Anthropic to acquire that content through piracy.
The Bartz case resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement for Anthropic. Impacted writers received about $3,000 per work for roughly 500,000 copyrighted works. While $1.5 billion is a substantial sum, it is a relatively minor amount for a company valued at $183 billion.
Originally, these music publishers had filed a lawsuit against Anthropic concerning about 500 copyrighted works. However, during the discovery process of the Bartz case, the publishers say they uncovered evidence that Anthropic had illegally downloaded thousands more songs.
The publishers attempted to amend their original lawsuit to include these new piracy claims, but the court denied that motion in October. The court ruled they had failed to investigate the piracy allegations earlier. This denial prompted the publishers to file this separate lawsuit, which also names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.
The lawsuit states, “While Anthropic misleadingly claims to be an AI ‘safety and research’ company, its record of illegal torrenting of copyrighted works makes clear that its multibillion-dollar business empire has in fact been built on piracy.”
Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.