Music publishers sue Anthropic for $3B over alleged piracy

A cohort of music publishers, led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. against Anthropic. The plaintiffs allege that the company illegally downloaded 20,000 copyrighted works. According to a statement released by the publishers on Wednesday, the potential damages in the lawsuit could amount to more than $3 billion, which would make it one of the largest non-class action copyright cases filed in U.S. history.

The legal battle draws on the precedent of Bartz v. Anthropic, a previous legal case in which a group of authors similarly accused the AI company of using their copyrighted works. In that case, Judge William Alsup ruled that training AI models on copyrighted content is legal, but acquiring that content via piracy is not. The Bartz case resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement, with impacted writers receiving about $3,000 per work for roughly 500,000 copyrighted works. While $1.5 billion is a substantial sum, it represents a fraction of Anthropic’s $183 billion valuation.

The music publishers had originally filed a lawsuit against Anthropic over its use of about 500 copyrighted works. However, through the discovery process in the Bartz case, the publishers say they found that Anthropic had also illegally downloaded thousands more. The publishers tried to amend their original lawsuit to address the piracy issue, but the court denied that motion back in October, ruling they had failed to investigate the piracy claims earlier. That move prompted the publishers to instead file this separate lawsuit, which also names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.

The lawsuit levels sharp criticism at the company’s public positioning. According to the legal filing, “While Anthropic misleadingly claims to be an AI ‘safety and research’ company, its record of illegal torrenting of copyrighted works makes clear that its multibillion-dollar business empire has in fact been built on piracy”. The plaintiffs assert that the company’s growth relies on flagrant piracy rather than the ethical standards it publicly promotes.

Why it matters

This case is one of the largest non-class action copyright lawsuits in U.S. history and directly challenges the data acquisition methods of an AI developer.