A group of music publishers led by Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging the AI company illegally downloaded more than 20,000 copyrighted songs and related materials. The publishers claim potential damages exceeding $3 billion, which would rank among the largest non-class action copyright cases in U.S. history.
The lawsuit follows earlier litigation against Anthropic brought by authors in the Bartz v. Anthropic case. In that ruling, Judge William Alsup said training AI models on copyrighted content can be lawful, but acquiring that content through piracy is not. The case resulted in Anthropic paying about $1.5 billion in damages tied to roughly 500,000 works.
The publishers initially sued Anthropic over the use of about 500 works but say discovery revealed widespread unauthorized downloading of additional material. After a court denied their attempt to amend the original complaint, the publishers filed a separate lawsuit that also names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.
The case adds to a growing wave of legal challenges facing AI developers, including a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing Adobe of training its SlimLM model on pirated books, underscoring intensifying scrutiny over how copyrighted data is used in AI systems.
