Major Music Publishers Seek to Dramatically Expand Their Anthropic Lawsuit Based on Daming New Evidence

Publishers expand their lawsuit against AI company Anthropic, alleging it used BitTorrent to pirate copyrighted material and share it with others.

Major music publishers, including Universal Music Group and Concord, first sued AI company Anthropic in 2023 for copyright infringement. The suit featured allegations that its Claude chatbot had been trained on copyrighted material without permission. Now, publishers allege that Anthropic concealed the fact that it used torrenting software to pirate copyrighted lyrics.

In a document filed on Monday (August 11), with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the publishers seek to expand their existing lawsuit. That’s in light of new evidence—secured in a separate lawsuit—that Anthropic used BitTorrent to acquire unauthorized material for training.

The publishers say they found out about the allegation through the lawsuit filed by a number of book authors against Anthropic, also in 2023. The suit alleged that Claude had been trained on the authors’ books without permission, and evidence of Anthropic having used BitTorrent was presented during the case.

In June, Judge William Alsup of the same district court ruled that Anthropic’s unauthorized use of books to train AI is “fair use” under U.S. copyright law. However, pirating books through illicit websites is not. Anthropic is to stand trial for piracy in December, after failing to convince the judge to grant the company’s motion to stay the case while it appeals the ruling.

“Anthropic never disclosed to publishers in this case that it had used BitTorrent to copy books containing their works from pirate sites in this manner, despite publishers’ discovery requests calling for exactly this type of information,” the filing reads.

According to the filing, music publishers could seek to add a new charge against Anthropic for distributing copyrighted lyrics without a license.

As a decentralized file-sharing system, BitTorrent enables anyone who downloads a file to also upload parts of the file to other users. Anthropic, in using this software, would have uploaded lyrics for use by others engaged in piracy—not just downloaded it for its own (unauthorized) use.

But Anthropic isn’t the only AI developer accused of engaging in piracy to gather training data for its AI models. During a congressional hearing last month, a copyright law expert alleged that Meta used BitTorrent to collect data with the full knowledge and support of CEO Mark Zuckerberg.