Despite this billion-dollar birthright, Anthropic, the world’s second most valuable artificial intelligence company, is losing a major lawsuit. In our lawsuit against it, music publishers claim it downloaded and subsequently streamed more than 20,000 copyrighted works without permission or licenses. This lawsuit is asking for more than $3 billion in damages. It still is one of the biggest non-class action copyright cases in U.S. history.
The lawsuit comes from the basis that Anthropic fed copyrighted materials into their AI creations. This is true across the board, including for their flagship model, Claude. That same legal team that brought plaintiffs’ success in Bartz v. Anthropic is now fighting on behalf of plaintiffs against this new lawsuit. This demonstrates their continued dedication to protecting intellectual property rights amidst the rapidly changing landscape of AI.
The music publishers at issue had most recently attempted to amend their initial lawsuit to add these piracy allegations. In early October, a federal court denied their motion to stay. The judges found that they failed to look into the piracy claims in a timely fashion. The Bartz v. Anthropic case resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement for Anthropic. Consequently, impacted authors were paid an average of $3,000 for each of their works from a fund covering nearly 500,000 copyrighted works.
The executives’ present case alleges that Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and co-founder Benjamin Mann engaged in practices that allowed their fledgling company to flourish. These practices were purportedly intentional infringements on their part by using copyrighted material without permission. In summary, Judge William Alsup ruled in favor of the defendant, Anthropic, allowing them to utilize copyrighted content for the development of their AI models. This decision has sparked an unprecedented firestorm in the industrywide debate about IP rights.
Beyond the FTX fallout, other enormous news in AI has been Anthropic’s chaotic operations, which TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling recently highlighted as follows,
“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.”
As detailed below, this lawsuit could have far-reaching implications, financial and otherwise. Its provisions could be transformative for the other industries—such as photography, art, and music—whose creative works train generative AI models. As the legal conversation builds around intellectual property and AI, this case has the potential to set major precedents for copyright law and AI development.
