Music Publishers Sue Anthropic for $3 Billion Over Piracy of 20000 Songs

City: San Francisco: A group of music publishers is suing Anthropic. They say the AI company illegally downloaded over 20,000 copyrighted songs. This includes sheet music, song lyrics, and musical notes. The publishers believe they deserve more than $3 billion in damages. If true, this could be one of the biggest copyright cases in U.S. history.

The same legal team from another case, Bartz v. Anthropic, is involved here. In that case, authors accused Anthropic of misusing their works to make a product called Claude. A judge decided that although Anthropic can use some copyrighted materials, it cannot take them illegally.

In the earlier case, Anthropic had to pay $1.5 billion because of the authors’ claims. Each author received about $3,000 for their works. However, for a company worth $183 billion, this may not be much. Initially, music publishers had sued Anthropic for using about 500 copyrighted works. But in the Bartz case, they found Anthropic took thousands more.

The publishers wanted to update their lawsuit to include these new piracy claims. However, the court said they should have looked into this earlier. So, they filed a new lawsuit. It names Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as well.

The lawsuit claims, “Anthropic says it’s a company focused on AI safety and research. But its actions show it built its billion-dollar business on piracy.” Anthropic has not responded to a request for comment.