Music Publisher Sues Anthropic for $3 Billion Over "Blatant Piracy" of 20,000 Works

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

In a statement issued Wednesday, the publishers indicated potential damages could exceed $3 billion, positioning this as potentially one of the largest non-class-action copyright cases in U.S. history.

This lawsuit is being filed by the same legal team that handled the Bartz v. Anthropic case, where a group of fiction and non-fiction authors similarly accused the AI company of using their copyrighted works to train products like Claude.

In that earlier case, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic could legally use copyrighted content for model training. However, he noted that Anthropic's method of acquiring that content through piracy was unlawful.

The Bartz v. Anthropic case resulted in a $1.5 billion penalty for Anthropic, with affected authors receiving approximately $3,000 per work for about 500,000 copyrighted pieces. While $1.5 billion is a substantial sum, it represents a relatively minor financial impact for a company valued at $183 billion.

Initially, these music publishers had filed a lawsuit concerning Anthropic's use of roughly 500 copyrighted works. During the discovery phase of the Bartz case, however, the publishers claim they uncovered evidence that Anthropic had illegally downloaded a significantly larger volume of material.

The publishers attempted to amend their original complaint to address the piracy allegations, but the court rejected this motion in October, ruling they had failed to investigate the piracy claims earlier. This decision prompted the publishers to file this separate, independent lawsuit, naming 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 illegally downloading copyrighted works clearly shows that its multi-billion dollar commercial empire is actually built on piracy," the lawsuit states.