A group of prominent music publishers, spearheaded by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, has initiated a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging that the artificial intelligence company illicitly downloaded over 20,000 copyrighted musical works, including sheet music, lyrics, and entire compositions. The publishers estimate that these infringements could lead to damages exceeding $3 billion, marking this as potentially one of the largest copyright lawsuits in U.S. history.
This legal action comes from the same legal team involved in the Bartz v. Anthropic case, which accused the AI firm of utilizing protected works from fiction and nonfiction authors to train its AI model, Claude. While U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic could train its models on copyrighted materials under certain conditions, he emphasized that acquiring such content through piracy was unlawful.
In the previous case, Anthropic faced a penalty of $1.5 billion, with authors receiving approximately $3,000 for each of the 500,000 copyrighted works involved. Despite this hefty fine, it remains manageable for a company with a valuation of $183 billion.
Initially, the music publishers targeted Anthropic for the unauthorized use of about 500 copyrighted works. However, during the legal discovery process from the Bartz case, they uncovered evidence of additional infringements involving thousands more works. Attempts to revise their original complaint to include these findings were thwarted by the court in October, which ruled that the publishers had inadequately investigated their piracy claims earlier. Consequently, they opted to file this new lawsuit, which also holds Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann accountable.
The lawsuit contends, “Although Anthropic misleadingly presents itself as an AI ‘safety and research’ company, its pattern of illegal downloading of copyrighted materials indicates that its extensive business empire has been founded on piracy.”
