Music publisher sues Anthropic for $3 billion over ‘blatant copyright infringement’ of 20,000 works

A group of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group is suing Anthropic, alleging that the company illegally downloaded more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, lyrics and music.

Publishers said in a statement Wednesday that damages could exceed $3 billion, potentially making it the largest non-class action copyright lawsuit in U.S. history.

The lawsuit was brought by the same legal team as Barts v. Anthropic, in which a group of fiction and nonfiction authors alike accused AI companies of using copyrighted works to train products like Claude.

In that case, Judge William Alsup ruled that it was legal for Anthropic to use copyrighted content to train its models. However, he noted that it is illegal for Anthropic to obtain that content through copyright infringement.

The Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit cost Anthropic $1.5 billion, with affected authors receiving approximately $3,000 per work for approximately 500,000 copyrighted works. $1.5 billion may seem like a lot, but for a company valued at $183 billion, it’s not.

These music publishers originally filed suit against Anthropic over the use of approximately 500 copyrighted works. But the publishers say they discovered through the discovery process in the Barts case that Anthropic had made thousands more illegal downloads.

The publisher attempted to amend the original lawsuit to address the copyright infringement issue, but the court rejected that motion in October, ruling that it had not previously investigated the copyright infringement claim. The move prompted the publisher to instead file this separate lawsuit, which also names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.

“Although Anthropic makes misleading claims to be an AI ‘safety and research’ company, its record of illegal torrents of copyrighted works reveals that its multibillion-dollar business empire has actually been built on piracy,” the complaint states.

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