AIster · The agentic age · Laws & rulings
Music publishers sue Anthropic for more than $3 billion
Evidence from the authors' case gave music publishers a far larger piracy claim
Key facts
- Date
- 28 Jan 2026
- Era
- The agentic age
- Interest
- Laws & rulings
- Threads
- Labs & people
- Plaintiffs
- Universal Music Publishing, Concord and ABKCO
- Works
- 714 allegedly torrented; 20,517 in training and outputs
- Damages sought
- More than $3 billion, at up to $150,000 per work
- Defendants
- Anthropic, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann
Universal Music Publishing, Concord and ABKCO filed a second copyright suit against Anthropic. They alleged it used BitTorrent, a file-sharing network, to download pirated songbooks and sheet music containing 714 of their works, and infringed 20,517 works in training and outputs of newer Claude models, and they said damages could exceed $3 billion. The piracy claims came from discovery (the evidence-gathering stage) in Bartz v. Anthropic, the authors' case, after a court refused to add them to the publishers' 2023 lyrics suit.
Sources
- CourtListener (US District Court, N.D. California docket), Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, 5:26-cv-00880 (N.D. Cal.), 2026-01-28
- TechCrunch, Music publishers sue Anthropic for $3B over ‘flagrant piracy’ of 20,000 works, 2026-01-29
- Complete Music Update, Music publishers file new Anthropic lawsuit, adding in piracy claims and $3 billion mega-damages, 2026-01-29