Photo Credit: Anthropic
Potentially the biggest copyright case in US history, a coalition including UMG and Concord claims Anthropic engaged in mass-scale piracy to train its AI models.
A coalition of music publishers led by Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO Music has filed a new copyright infringement lawsuit against AI company Anthropic, alleging mass-scale piracy and copyright infringement of over 20,000 songs.
The whopping $3 billion complaint, filed on Wednesday (January 28) in the Northern District of California, is a notable step up from the publishers’ previous lawsuit against Anthropic, filed back in 2023. That lawsuit only covered around 500 works with potential damages of about $75 million—and was potentially getting bogged down in “fair use” arguments.
“We have been compelled to file this second lawsuit against Anthropic because of its persistent and brazen infringement of our songwriters’ copyrighted compositions taken from notorious pirate sites,” the music companies wrote in a statement. “The new case also addresses Anthropic’s ongoing violation of these rights by exploiting lyrics in the training of new AI models without authorization, as well as in the outputs generated.”
“In total, we are suing for infringement of more than 20,000 songs, with potential statutory damages of more than $3 billion,” they continued. “We believe this will be one of the largest (if not the single-largest) non-class action copyright cases filed in the U.S.”
Besides its massive alleged damages, the filing is also notable for naming Anthropic founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants for personally authorizing the illegal downloads from known piracy platforms.
The filing alleges that not only did Anthropic’s founders allow the illegal download of millions of pirated books via BitTorrent—including songbooks containing publishers’ copyrighted compositions—but that Anthropic continues to infringe their works by training newer models of its Claude AI on this unauthorized content.
Ironically, the publishers say they only discovered the alleged torrenting activities over the summer, when Judge William Alsup issued a ruling in a separate copyright case against the company (Bartz v. Anthropic) that publicly disclosed Anthropic’s use of pirate libraries.
That ruling let the cat out of the bag, according to the filing, revealing that Benjamin Mann “personally used BitTorrent to download via torrenting from LibGen approximately five million copies of pirated books” for Anthropic’s use. Further, Dario Amodei is accused of having “personally discussed and authorized this illegal torrenting.”
Previously, the publishers attempted to have the piracy claims added to their existing lawsuit, but that motion was denied in October.
