TL;DR

Music publishers led by Concord and Universal Music Group are suing Anthropic for over $3 billion, alleging the company illegally downloaded more than 20,000 copyrighted songs to train its AI models. This could be one of the largest non-class action copyright cases in US history.

Expanding Claims

The lawsuit, filed by the same legal team from the Bartz v. Anthropic case involving authors, names CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.

The publishers originally sued over approximately 500 copyrighted works. However, through discovery in the Bartz case, they claim to have found evidence that Anthropic illegally downloaded thousands more, including sheet music, song lyrics, and musical compositions.

In Bartz v. Anthropic, Judge William Alsup ruled that training AI models on copyrighted content is legal. However, he found it was not legal for Anthropic to acquire that content through piracy.

That case resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement, with affected writers receiving approximately $3,000 per work for roughly 500,000 copyrighted works. While substantial, critics noted it was not particularly burdensome for a company valued at $183 billion.

Separate Lawsuit Required

The publishers attempted to amend their original lawsuit to address the piracy claims discovered during the Bartz case. However, the court denied that motion in October, ruling they had failed to investigate the piracy claims earlier—prompting this separate lawsuit.

“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,” the lawsuit alleges.

Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.

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