Universal Music Group, Concord and More Sue Anthropic Over Alleged Piracy, With Potential $3 Billion in Damages

Universal Music Group, Concord and several other prominent music publishers filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging the AI company utilized “pirate libraries” of music to train its chatbot.

In documents obtained and viewed by TheWrap, the coalition made up of major music publishers — including Capitol Music Group and ABKCO — accused Anthropic of willful copyright infringement by allegedly “torrenting an enormous number of unauthorized copies of Publishers’ works from illegal shadow libraries to avoid paying for those works.”

“Defendants unlawfully torrented Publishers’ works to amass a vast central library of written texts Anthropic would maintain forever,” the suit continued. “To the extent Defendants now try to absolve themselves of liability for this blatant theft by claiming that Anthropic later used some subset of these stolen works for AI training, any such claimed use is irrelevant (and would not in any case qualify as fair use). Defendants’ piracy of each of Publishers’ musical compositions via torrenting was a standalone act of unmistakable, irredeemable infringement.”

Anthropic is accused of pirating more than 700 works, including the lyrics and sheet music to “Wild Horses,” “Sweet Caroline,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “Eye of the Tiger,” “Have You Ever Seen The Rain,” “Bittersweet Symphony,” “She Will Be Loved,” “Viva La Vida,” “California Gurls” and “Radioactive.”

In a statement to the media, the publishers at the center of the lawsuit said they were “suing for infringement of more than 20,000 songs, with potential statutory damages of more than $3 billion.”

They added: “We believe this will be one of the largest (if not the single-largest) non-class action copyright cases filed in the U.S.”

The coalition’s new lawsuit expands on an earlier 2023 suit filed by the music companies, in which they alleged that the AI company had violated copyrights by using their songs without permission to teach the computer program Claude how to pen lyrics.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment, but the company has previously denied the copyright infringement allegations.

The post Universal Music Group, Concord and More Sue Anthropic Over Alleged Piracy, With Potential $3 Billion in Damages appeared first on TheWrap.