A group of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the United States, according to Reuters. The suit accuses the AI company of illegally downloading more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, lyrics, and compositions, then using them to train its chatbot Claude.
Universal Music Group named specific iconic tracks in the lawsuit, such as songs by The Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond, and Elton John, along with many others. Concord Music Group, an independent publisher, represents artists including Common, Killer Mike, and Korn. These publishers discovered Anthropic’s actions during the discovery phase of the prior Bartz v. Anthropic case, where evidence emerged that the company had illegally downloaded thousands of songs.
The lawsuit states that damages could exceed $3 billion, positioning the case as one of the largest non-class action copyright disputes in U.S. history. It includes a direct quotation: “While Anthropic misleadingly claims to be an AI ‘safety and research’ company, its record of illegal torrenting of copyrighted works makes clear that its multibillion-dollar business empire has in fact been built on piracy.”
The legal team filing this suit is the same one that handled last year’s Bartz v. Anthropic case. That earlier litigation concluded with a $1.5 billion award to 500,000 impacted writers and authors. Under the settlement terms, each of the 500,000 authors received $3,000 per work involved.
Anthropic holds a valuation of around $350 billion. The publishers’ claims stem directly from findings in the Bartz discovery process, which revealed the extent of the company’s unauthorized song downloads for training purposes similar to those used for the writers’ works.
In the Bartz case, Judge William Alsup issued a ruling that permitted Anthropic to train its AI models on copyrighted content. The decision specified, however, that acquiring such content through piracy remained illegal. This distinction forms the basis for the current music publishers’ arguments.
The publishers assert that Anthropic’s method of obtaining the 20,000 songs via illegal downloads violates this precedent. Evidence from the Bartz discovery phase documented thousands of such downloads, extending to musical works beyond the original literary focus. Concord and Universal emphasize the scale, covering sheet music, lyrics, and full compositions from major artists.
The suit details how these materials fed directly into Claude’s development, mirroring the training process challenged in Bartz. With damages pegged above $3 billion, the case tests the boundaries of Judge Alsup’s acquisition ruling in a new domain of copyrighted music.
