A group of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group anthropic, . The lawsuit accuses the AI ​​company of illegally downloading more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, lyrics and compositions.

These songs are said to be fed to the chatbot Claude for training purposes. There are some iconic tunes named by Universal in the suit, including tracks by The Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond and Elton John, among others. Concord is an independent publisher that manages artists such as Common, Killer Mike and Korn.

The publishers issued a statement saying the damage could reach more than $3 billion. This would make it one of the largest non-class action copyright cases in US history.

“While Anthropic misleadingly claims to be an AI ‘security and research’ company, its record of illegally streaming copyrighted works makes clear that its multibillion-dollar business empire was actually built on piracy,” the lawsuit said.

The case was filed by the same legal team as . Music publishers say they found Anthropic had illegally downloaded thousands of songs during the .

For those unfamiliar, Bartz v. The Anthropic lawsuit ended with an award of $1.5 billion to the affected writers after it was found that the company illegally downloaded their published works for the same training purpose. The terms of that agreement dictate that the 500,000 authors involved in the lawsuit will receive $3,000 per work. $1.5 billion sounds like a big number, but not much when broken down like that. Also, Anthropic .

In Bartz’s case, Judge William Alsup ruled that it was legal for Anthropic to train its models on copyrighted content but not legal to obtain that content through piracy. Let’s wait and see how this new suit works. The legal precedent here seems to suggest that if Anthropic just spends a buck on each copyrighted song, then it’s clear. That’s an odd distinction when it comes to building an entire company around ripping off copyrighted content, but whatever.