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

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

Damages could reach more than $3 billion, the publishers said in a statement on Wednesday, one of the largest non-class-action copyright lawsuits filed in U.S. history.

This lawsuit was brought by the same legal team in Bartz v. Anthropic, where a group of fiction and non-fiction authors similarly accused the AI ​​company of using their copyrighted works to train products like Cloud.

In that case, Judge William Alsop ruled that it was legal for Anthropic to train its models on copyrighted content. But he pointed out that it is not legal for Anthropic to obtain this content through piracy.

Bartz v. Anthropic became a $1.5 billion slap on the wrist for Anthropic, with affected writers receiving about $3,000 per work for about 500,000 copyrighted works. While $1.5 billion sounds like a lot of money, it’s not that painful for a company worth $183 billion.

Originally, these music publishers sued Anthropic over its use of approximately 500 copyrighted works. But through the discovery process in Bartz’s case, the publishers say they discovered that Anthropic also illegally downloaded thousands more.

The publishers attempted to amend their original lawsuit to address the piracy issue, but the court rejected that motion in October, ruling that they had failed to investigate the piracy allegations earlier. The move prompted the publishers to file this separate lawsuit instead, 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 illegally downloading copyrighted works demonstrates that its multi-billion-dollar business empire was in fact built on piracy,” the lawsuit says.

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