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

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

The publishers said in a statement on Wednesday that the damages could amount to more than $3 billion, which would be one of the largest non-class action copyright cases filed in U.S. history.

This lawsuit 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 is 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 via piracy.

The Bartz v. Anthropic case became a slap on the wrist worth $1.5 billion for Anthropic, with impacted writers receiving about $3,000 per work for roughly 500,000 copyrighted works. While $1.5 billion seems like a substantial sum, it’s not exactly back-breaking for a company valued at $183 billion.

Originally, these music publishers had filed a lawsuit against Anthropic over its use of about 500 copyrighted works. But through the discovery process in the Bartz case, the publishers say they found that Anthropic had also illegally downloaded thousands more.

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

“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 says.

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