Anthropic is staring down what could become one of the largest copyright battles in U.S. history. A coalition of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group just filed a $3 billion lawsuit alleging the AI company illegally downloaded more than 20,000 copyrighted songs - including sheet music, lyrics, and compositions. The case marks a dramatic 40x escalation from the publishers' original 500-work complaint, and it's naming Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.
Anthropic built a multibillion-dollar AI empire on what music publishers are now calling "flagrant piracy." The company behind Claude is facing a $3 billion lawsuit from a coalition led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, who claim Anthropic illegally torrented more than 20,000 copyrighted musical works to train its AI models.
The publishers announced the lawsuit Wednesday, revealing that damages could reach over $3 billion - a figure that would make this one of the largest non-class action copyright cases ever filed in American courts. The scale of the alleged infringement is staggering: sheet music, song lyrics, and complete musical compositions spanning decades of recorded music history.
What makes this case particularly damaging is how the evidence emerged. The publishers initially sued Anthropic over roughly 500 copyrighted works. But during discovery in the separate Bartz v. Anthropic case, where fiction and nonfiction authors accused the company of similar copyright violations, the publishers say they uncovered evidence of far more extensive piracy. According to , had illegally downloaded thousands more works than originally known.
