Music publisher sues Anthropic for $3B over ‘blatant piracy’ of 20,000 works

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

Publishers said in a statement there is that damage can amount to more than $3 billion, which will be one of the largest non-class copyright cases filed in US history.

This lawsuit filed by the same legal team from Bartz v. Anthropic case, where a group of fiction and nonfiction authors alike accused an AI company of using their copyrighted work to train products like Claude.

In that case, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic was legally allowed to train its models on copyrighted content. However, they stated that Anthropic illegally obtained the content through piracy.

The case of Bartz v. Anthropic is a slap on the wrist worth $1.5 billion to Anthropic, with affected writers receiving around $3,000 per work for approximately 500,000 copyrighted works. While $1.5 billion seems like a large amount, it doesn’t necessarily backfire for the company price at $ 183 billion.

Originally, this music publisher filed a lawsuit against Anthropic for using around 500 copyrighted works. But through the discovery process in the Bartz case, the publisher said it discovered that Anthropic had also illegally downloaded thousands more.

The publisher tried to amend the original lawsuit to address the piracy issue, but a court denied the motion in October, ruling that they had failed to investigate the piracy claims beforehand. The move prompted the publisher to 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 ‘security and research’ company, records of illegal torrents of copyrighted works make it 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.