Music publishers sue Anthropic for $3B over piracy of 20,000 songs

Music publishers led by Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group filed a lawsuit on January 28, 2026 accusing Anthropic of downloading more than 20,000 copyrighted songs through BitTorrent and shadow libraries to train its Claude AI models without authorization. The complaint named Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants and sought up to $3 billion in statutory damages — one of the largest non-class-action copyright claims in US history. The suit was distinct from a prior 2023 Concord case covering 499 works.