A group of music publishers, spearheaded by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, has initiated legal proceedings against Anthropic, alleging that the company unlawfully downloaded over 20,000 copyrighted musical works, which includes sheet music, lyrics, and compositions.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the publishers indicated that the potential damages could exceed $3 billion, positioning this case as one of the most significant copyright lawsuits in U.S. history outside of class action suits.
This lawsuit is brought forth by the same legal team involved in the Bartz v. Anthropic case, where a collective of authors accused the AI firm of utilizing their copyrighted materials for training its products, including Claude.
In that instance, Judge William Alsup determined that while it was permissible for Anthropic to train its models using copyrighted content, acquiring that content through piracy was illegal.
The previous case resulted in a $1.5 billion penalty for Anthropic, with affected authors receiving approximately $3,000 for each of the 500,000 copyrighted works involved. Although $1.5 billion is a substantial figure, it does not pose a significant challenge for a company valued at $183 billion.
Initially, the music publishers had filed a lawsuit concerning Anthropic's use of around 500 copyrighted works. However, during the discovery phase of the Bartz case, they uncovered evidence that Anthropic had also illegally accessed thousands of additional works.
Despite attempts to modify their original lawsuit to include the piracy allegations, the court rejected their motion in October, citing their failure to investigate these claims earlier. Consequently, the publishers opted to file this separate lawsuit, which also names Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.
The lawsuit states, "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."
As of now, Anthropic has not provided a response to inquiries from TechCrunch.