Music publishers sue Anthropic for $3 billion over ‘flagrant piracy’

A group of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group are suing Anthropic, according to a report by Reuters. The suit accuses the AI company of illegally downloading more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, lyrics and compositions.

These songs were then allegedly fed into the chatbot Claude for training purposes. There are some iconic tunes named by Universal in the suit, including tracks by The Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond and Elton John, among many others. Concord is an independent publisher that handles artists like Common, Killer Mike and Korn.

The publishers issued a statement saying that the damages could amount to more than $3 billion. This would make it one of the largest non-class action copyright cases in US history.

"While Anthropic misleadingly claims to be an AI 'safety and research' company, its record of illegal torrenting of copyrighted works makes clear ...