Music Publishers File $3 Billion Lawsuit Against Anthropic for Alleged Piracy of 20,000 Works
In a significant legal move, a coalition of music publishers, including industry giants Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, has initiated a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Anthropic. The publishers allege that Anthropic unlawfully downloaded over 20,000 copyrighted musical works, encompassing sheet music, song lyrics, and compositions. The plaintiffs are seeking damages exceeding $3 billion, positioning this case among the largest non-class action copyright lawsuits in U.S. history.
This legal action follows a previous case, Bartz v. Anthropic, where a group of authors accused the company of using their copyrighted materials to train its AI products, such as the language model Claude. In that instance, Judge William Alsup determined that while training AI models on copyrighted content could be permissible under certain conditions, acquiring such content through piracy is illegal. The outcome of the Bartz case resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement, with affected authors receiving approximately $3,000 per work. Despite the substantial settlement, this amount is relatively minor for Anthropic, a company valued at $183 billion.
Initially, the music publishers filed a lawsuit against Anthropic concerning the use of around 500 copyrighted works. However, during the discovery phase of the Bartz case, they uncovered evidence suggesting that Anthropic had illegally downloaded thousands more works. Attempts to amend the original lawsuit to include these additional claims were denied by the court in October, citing the publishers’ failure to investigate the piracy allegations earlier. Consequently, the publishers have filed this separate lawsuit, naming Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.
The lawsuit asserts that Anthropic’s claims of being an AI safety and research company are misleading, alleging that its multibillion-dollar business is fundamentally built on piracy. As of now, Anthropic has not responded to requests for comment.
