Anthropic faces new music publisher lawsuit over alleged piracy

By Blake Brittain

Jan 28 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic was hit with a new lawsuit in California federal court on Wednesday by music publishers Universal Music Group UMG.AS, Concord and ABKCO for allegedly misusing their songs to train Anthropic's chatbot Claude.

The publishers said in the lawsuit that Anthropic pirated more than 700 of their works — including the lyrics and sheet music to the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses," Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" and Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets" — and violated their rights in thousands more.

"In total, we are suing for infringement of more than 20,000 songs, with potential statutory damages of more than $3 billion," the publishers said in a statement on Wednesday. "We believe this will be one of the largest (if not the single-largest) non-class action copyright cases filed in the U.S.”

Spokespeople for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The case builds on an earlier ongoing lawsuit the same publishers brought against Anthropic in 2023 over the use of their work to train Claude to respond to human prompts. Anthropic has denied the allegations.

Anthropic last year agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a similar lawsuit from book authors. U.S. District Judge William Alsup said in that case that the copyright doctrine of fair use shielded Anthropic from infringement claims related to its AI training, but found the company could have separately been liable for up to $1 trillion in damages for pirating the authors' books.

The Wednesday lawsuit said that those pirated books contained the copyrighted sheet music and lyrics to at least 714 of the publishers' songs.

Tech companies are facing a wave of high-stakes lawsuits brought by copyright owners including authors, music labels and visual artists against tech companies over the alleged misuse of their work in AI training. Many of the defendants have argued that the training is protected by fair use.

The case is Concord Music Group Inc v. Anthropic PBC, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:26-cv-00880.

For the publishers: Matt Oppenheim, Nick Hailey, Corey Miller and Jennifer Pariser of Oppenheim + Zebrak; Jeffrey Knowles, Thomas Harvey and Bina Patel of Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass; Jonathan King and Richard Dannay of Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman

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