Music publishers sue Anthropic for $3B over alleged copyright infringement
A coalition 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 works including sheet music, lyrics, and musical compositions.
The publishers stated that potential damages could exceed $3 billion, which would make it one of the largest non-class action copyright cases in U.S. history.
This lawsuit was filed by the same legal team from the Bartz v. Anthropic case, where authors previously accused the AI company of using copyrighted works to train its Claude model. In that case, a judge ruled that training AI models on copyrighted content is legal, but acquiring that content through piracy is not.
The Bartz case resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement for roughly 500,000 copyrighted works, with affected writers receiving approximately $3,000 per work. While significant, this amount is not considered crippling for Anthropic, a company valued at $183 billion.
Originally, music publishers had sued Anthropic over about 500 copyrighted works. However, during the discovery process of the Bartz case, they claim to have uncovered evidence that Anthropic illegally downloaded thousands more.
The publishers attempted to amend their original lawsuit to address piracy claims, but the court denied this motion in October, ruling they had failed to investigate the piracy allegations earlier. This denial prompted them 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 has not responded to requests for comment on the allegations.
