Anthropic accused of ‘flagrant piracy,’ sued for $3 billion by music publishers

The world of consumer artificial intelligence has been hit with accusations of theft and piracy for as long as it’s existed, and that trend is continuing with Anthropic.

The company behind the Claude chatbot and other AI products was on the receiving end of a $3 billion lawsuit from the music industry late last week, per Reuters. Music publishers including Universal Music Group, ABKCO, and Concord are alleging that Anthropic pirated more than 700 pieces of music (including sheet music and lyrics) they own for use in training Claude. However, the lawsuit also alleges that as many as 20,000 pieces of music could have been infringed upon in this process, hence the massive financial penalty attached to the lawsuit.

Anthropic ought to be used to this by now, having previously been sued by the same music publishers for similar reasons in 2023. Just last year, the company settled with book authors who had accused Anthropic of piracy for $1.5 billion. The same sort of thing has come for other AI companies in the recent past, too, as a German court ruled that OpenAI had violated copyright laws related to music last year.

It remains to be seen exactly how the growing AI industry will reckon with copyright laws as they exist beyond just settling for huge sums of money with every party that sues them. For now, expect lawsuits like this to keep periodically happening until everyone figures out the right way to approach this issue.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.