Music publishers sue Anthropic for $3 billion over 'flagrant piracy'

"A group of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group Anthropic, . The suit accuses the AI company of illegally downloading more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, lyrics and compositions. These songs were then allegedly fed into the chatbot Claude for training purposes. There are some iconic tunes named by Universal in the suit, including tracks by The Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond and Elton John, among many others. Concord is an independent publisher that handles artists like Common, Killer Mike and Korn."

"The publishers issued a statement saying that the damages could amount to more than $3 billion. This would make it one of the largest non-class action copyright cases in US history. "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 lawsuit says."

"The suit was filed by the same legal team as last year's Bartz v. Anthropic case. The music publishers say they found that Anthropic had been illegally downloading thousands of songs during the discovery process of that suit. For the unfamiliar, the Bartz v. Anthropic case ended with an award of $1.5 billion to impacted writers after it was found that the company had illegally downloaded their published works for similar training purposes. The terms of that agreement dictated that the 500,000 authors involved in the case would get $3,000 per work. The $1.5 billion looks like a big number, but not so much when broken down like that. Also, Anthropic is worth around $350 billion."

A group of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group has sued Anthropic for allegedly downloading more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, lyrics, and compositions, and using them to train the Claude chatbot. The publishers say the damages could exceed $3 billion, which would rank among the largest non-class action copyright cases in U.S. history. The suit was filed by the same legal team from the Bartz v. Anthropic case, which previously resulted in a $1.5 billion award after finding Anthropic had illegally downloaded published works. A judge in Bartz ruled that training on copyrighted content can be legal but acquiring that content via piracy is not.

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