Anthropic already paid $1.5 billion for pirating books. Now music publishers say that wasn't nearly enough to make the point stick.
Sony, EMI, and Warner Chappell filed a lawsuit on Friday alleging that Anthropic's illegal torrenting didn't stop at text. The publishers claim the AI company also grabbed "thousands upon thousands" of their copyrighted musical compositions to train Claude. Their central argument: Anthropic's earlier settlement with authors, in which it admitted to pirating more than 7 million books, was too small to change behavior at a company now valued at roughly $2 trillion.
That's the real story here. A billion-and-a-half dollars sounds enormous until you set it against a $2 trillion valuation - then it starts to look like a rounding error, or even a cost of doing business. If publishers are right that the fine didn't deter further infringement, expect every future AI copyright settlement to get measured against company valuation, not just alleged damages.
Anthropic has now been accused of pirating both the words its models were trained to write and the music they can hum along to. Book publishers already extracted a record settlement. Music publishers are betting they can do the same - only this time, with a bigger number attached.