Music publishers sue Anthropic for $3B over ‘flagrant piracy’ of 20,000 works

A group of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group is suing Anthropic, alleging the company illegally downloaded more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, lyrics and musical compositions.

The publishers said in a statement Wednesday that damages could exceed $3 billion, which would be one of the largest non-class action copyright lawsuits filed in U.S. history.

This court case was filed by the same legal team from the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which a group of fiction and nonfiction authors similarly accused the AI ​​company of using their copyrighted works to train products like Claude.

In that case, Judge William Alsup ruled that it was legal for Anthropic to train its models on copyrighted content. However, he pointed out that it was not legal for Anthropic to acquire that content through piracy.

The Bartz v. Anthropic case became a $1.5 billion slap on the wrist for Anthropic, with affected writers receiving approximately $3,000 per work for approximately 500,000 copyrighted works. While $1.5 billion seems like a substantial amount, it’s not exactly a disaster for a company valued at $183 billion.

Originally, these music publishers filed a lawsuit against Anthropic for using approximately 500 copyrighted works. But through the discovery process in the Bartz case, the publishers say they discovered that Anthropic had also illegally downloaded thousands.

The publishers attempted to amend their original lawsuit to address the piracy issue, but the court rejected that motion back in October, ruling that they had previously failed to investigate the piracy claims. That move prompted the publishers to instead file a separate lawsuit, which also names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.

“Although Anthropic misleadingly claims to be an AI ‘security and research company,’ its track record of illegal torrenting of copyrighted works makes it clear that its multibillion-dollar business empire is in fact built on piracy,” the lawsuit says.

Anthropic did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.