A coalition of music publishers, including Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord, and ABKCO, has filed a new lawsuit against AI company Anthropic, dramatically escalating a previous legal dispute. The publishers now allege infringement of over 20,000 songs and are seeking more than $3 billion in statutory damages, a significant increase from the initial lawsuit in October 2023 that covered about 500 works.
The new complaint, filed in the Northern District of California, accuses Anthropic of using BitTorrent to download copyrighted song lyrics from "notorious pirate sites" to train its Claude series of AI models. The publishers claim they were compelled to file the second lawsuit due to Anthropic's "persistent and brazen infringement" and its continued use of these works to train new AI models without authorization.