Concord Music Group, Universal Music Group and ABKCO Music file piracy case against Anthropic for mass torrenting of copyright works

Concord Music Group, Universal Music Group and ABKCO Music file piracy case against Anthropic for mass torrenting of copyright works

The complainants have alleged that despite claiming to adopt the so-called barriers, the models still generated infringing lyrics and could be easily accessed by users

American music companies, Concord Music Group, Inc., Universal Music Group, and ABKCO Music, Inc. have filed a complaint in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, for copyright and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations against Anthropic PBC, Dario Amodei, and Benjamin Mann.

This is yet another lawsuit against generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies.

Earlier, the publishers had alleged that Anthropic engaged in mass piracy by downloading millions of unauthorized copies of books containing their copyrighted musical compositions from notorious pirate library websites, including Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi).

They further submitted that Anthropic used BitTorrent to acquire their works. It subsequently trained its Claude AI models on the stolen content, thereby directly infringing the publishers’ exclusive rights and undermining the music licensing domain.

As per the complaint, the evidence revealed in the Bartz v. Anthropic PBC case showed that Benjamin Mann had personally engaged in illegal torrenting activities. The filing also alleged that Dario Amodei had discussed and authorized the conduct.

The music companies, Concord, Universal, and ABKCO, asserted that Anthropic concealed the torrenting violations during the probe in an earlier Concord Music Group, Inc., et al. v. Anthropic PBC (Concord I) case, which addressed the exploitation of 499 musical compositions in Claude AI models.

They maintained identifying 714 works in Exhibit A of the complaint, including well-known compositions including ‘Wild Horses,’ ‘Sweet Caroline,’ ‘Bennie and the Jets,’ and ‘Eye of the Tiger.’

Additionally, 20,517 works were identified in Exhibit B.

Furthermore, the complaint stated that Anthropic unlawfully torrented those works to build a vast central library of written texts. When Anthropic used BitTorrent to download the works, the company simultaneously uploaded unauthorized copies to the public at large. This, separately, violated the exclusive right of distribution and encouraged infringement further.

The music publishers also submitted that Anthropic’s new AI models, including Claude 4.5 Sonnet, Claude 4.5 Haiku, and Claude 4.5 Opus, were trained to memorize the publishers’ works. As a result, the models generated outputs that copied the music publishers’ lyrics in various ways.

The complaint further stressed that despite Anthropic’s purported adoption of so-called guardrails, the models still generated infringing lyrics and could be easily accessed by users to output copyrighted content.

The music companies argued that any claimed use for AI training was irrelevant and did not qualify as fair use because the act of torrenting constituted a standalone act of unmistakable infringement.

Apart from copyright infringement claims, the complainants asserted, including a count for the removal or alteration of the Copyright Management Information (CMI) under the DMCA.

The three biggies - Concord, Universal, and ABKCO alleged that Anthropic intentionally removed or altered CMI from their works during the training process.

They accused Anthropic of applying algorithms known to remove copyright notices and other identifying information from the copied text. The companies stated that Anthropic did so by design because, while treating CMI as useless, its objective was for the models to reproduce expressive content.

The publishers are pursuing relief on multiple counts. These include: direct copyright infringement, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, and DMCA violations.

Meanwhile, Concord, Universal, and ABKCO have sought statutory damages under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c) up to $150,000 per work infringed for wilful violations.

As for the CMI violations, the three companies have sought statutory damages up to $25,000 per violation pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 1203(c)(3)(B).

Alternatively, Concord, Universal, and ABKCO are seeking their actual damages and Anthropic’s profits from the infringement.

Furthermore, the requested relief includes a permanent injunction, an order requiring Anthropic to provide an accounting of its training data and methods, and an order requiring the destruction of all infringing copies.

The complainants have emphasized that Anthropic’s conduct had far-reaching consequences for the music licensing market. they claimed that by usurping the works without authorization, Anthropic undercut the entire market and lowered the overall value of the compositions.

While recognizing the potential of ethical AI, the music publishers stated that they had been exploring licenses for authorized uses of their musical compositions. However, they added that the AI technology must be developed responsibly by protecting the rights of the songwriters and the creative ecosystem.

Blaming Anthropic, Concord, Universal, and ABKCO argued that the company had the means to take simple steps to avoid contributing to infringement, but it failed to carry it out. Instead, the company gathered training data, including the publishers’ copyrighted works, and provided the site and facilities necessary for users of its AI models to commit direct infringement.

The three complainants added, “Anthropic has created a tool, trained on unauthorized copies of publishers’ works, that permits users to generate vast quantities of AI-generated lyrics and songs that compete with publishers’ legitimate copyrighted works and harm the market for and value of those works.”

Meanwhile, this complaint in the US Court is the latest in a series of more than 50 copyright-related suits filed in the country against AI developers.

In September 2025, Anthropic had agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which the authors alleged that the AI company trained its models on hundreds of thousands of pirated books.

Similarly, in October 2025, Reddit filed a suit against Perplexity AI for allegedly bypassing its security measures to scrape user-generated content.

In December 2025, The New York Times Company filed a complaint against Perplexity AI for copyright and trademark infringement related to the unauthorized use of millions of its articles.