A group of prominent music publishers, including Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, has initiated a significant lawsuit against AI company Anthropic. The publishers allege that Anthropic illegally downloaded over 20,000 copyrighted musical works, encompassing sheet music, song lyrics, and full musical compositions. This legal action, announced on Wednesday, seeks damages potentially exceeding $3 billion, a sum that could position it among the largest non-class action copyright cases ever filed in U.S. history.

This lawsuit is being spearheaded by the same legal team that represented plaintiffs in the prior Bartz v. Anthropic case. In that instance, a coalition of fiction and nonfiction authors accused Anthropic of utilizing their copyrighted materials to train its AI products, such as Claude. While Judge William Alsup ruled that training AI models on copyrighted content is permissible, he explicitly stated that acquiring such content through piracy is illegal.

The Bartz v. Anthropic case concluded with a $1.5 billion settlement, where affected writers received approximately $3,000 for each of the roughly 500,000 copyrighted works involved. Despite this substantial figure, it was noted that $1.5 billion is not considered 'back-breaking' for a company valued at $183 billion.

The current dispute by the music publishers evolved from an earlier lawsuit initially focused on approximately 500 copyrighted works. However, during the discovery phase of the Bartz case, the publishers claim they uncovered evidence of Anthropic's illegal download of thousands more copyrighted songs. Their attempt to amend their original lawsuit to incorporate these new piracy allegations was denied by the court in October, which cited their failure to investigate these claims earlier. This denial prompted the music publishers to file the new, separate lawsuit. This updated legal filing also names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants, personally implicating them in the alleged misconduct.

The lawsuit asserts, “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.” Anthropic has not yet responded to TechCrunch’s request for comment regarding these accusations.