A group of music publishers, spearheaded by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, has initiated legal action against Anthropic. They allege the company unlawfully obtained over 20,000 copyrighted songs, encompassing sheet music, lyrics, and musical compositions.

In a statement released Wednesday, the publishers indicated potential damages could exceed $3 billion. If awarded, this would rank among the largest non-class action copyright cases in U.S. history.

The legal team representing the publishers is the same one from the prior Bartz v. Anthropic case. In that lawsuit, a collection of authors accused Anthropic of using their copyrighted books to train AI models like Claude. Judge William Alsup ruled in that case that training models on copyrighted content is permissible, but clarified that obtaining that content through piracy is not.

The outcome of the Bartz case resulted in a $1.5 billion judgment against Anthropic. Affected authors received approximately $3,000 per work for around 500,000 copyrighted pieces. While a significant figure, this sum is relatively manageable for a company valued at $183 billion.

These music publishers had originally sued Anthropic concerning roughly 500 copyrighted works. However, during the discovery phase of the Bartz case, they claim to have uncovered evidence that Anthropic illegally downloaded thousands more songs.

The publishers attempted to amend their initial lawsuit to include these new piracy allegations, but the court denied this motion in October. The ruling stated they had failed to investigate the piracy claims earlier. This denial led directly to the filing of this new, separate lawsuit.

The new complaint also names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants. It argues, “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.”