The cost of doing business

On 28 August thirty-five music publishing companies, trading as Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, filed suit against Anthropic in the Northern District of California. The complaint names the company and, for the first time in a music case at filing, two of its founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. It alleges "a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale" and calls the result "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history".

The mechanics it describes are the ones already on the record from the book cases. In June 2021, the complaint says, Mann torrented at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis at Amodei's direction, and employees added about two million more from a second pirate library the next year. Songbooks were among them. Lyrics arrived by other routes as well, through the Books3 and Pile datasets and through Common Crawl, which had swept up lyrics from licensed sites. The publishers say hundreds of compositions came in through the torrented songbooks and tens of thousands through training and output. They ask for up to 150,000 dollars per work, which is the statutory ceiling for wilful infringement, not a sum they have calculated.

Anthropic told TechCrunch it disagrees and will defend itself robustly, and told Reuters this is "the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts". That is accurate as far as the lawyers go. Concord and Universal, represented by the same firm, filed in October 2023 over about five hundred works and won court-approved guardrails on lyric output in January 2025; their second suit, filed this January over 21,231 works, added the founders in April. BMG and Round Hill sued separately, in March and August. All three majors are now litigating.

The claim this entry scores is the Bonus Problem. Chapter 6 argues that the people whose work trains a model fund their own wage cut by teaching it, that the commons they built is enclosed as private capital and that they are left with no royalty, no consent and no claim on the asset. The publishers' complaint is that argument with a docket number, and it adds one detail the book could not have: Anthropic's own Economic Index, which the complaint cites, tracks how lyricists are being "impacted or augmented" by Claude.

The filing's sharpest sentence is about a number that predates it. In July a judge gave final approval to the settlement of the authors' case, Bartz v Anthropic: 1.5 billion dollars for roughly half a million books, about 3,000 dollars a work, paid to the authors themselves as a class rather than to their publishers. The new complaint reads that outcome in one sentence. Anthropic, it says, "clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business." The company's revenue run-rate reached 65 billion dollars a year in August. Its last funding round valued it at 965 billion dollars. At those figures the largest copyright settlement in history is about eight days of revenue and a sixth of one per cent of the company.

So the price of the commons is being set, and this is what it looks like. A one-off payment per work, funded from a year's cash flow, with the asset that was built on the commons left intact and privately owned.

That complicates the claim as the book states it, and the entry should say so. The chapter says the work is taken without royalty, without consent and without any claim on the asset. Two of those three are no longer quite true. A German court held in July that training on GEMA's repertoire without consent infringes, and Buma/Stemra welcomed the ruling in the Netherlands with the line that AI platforms "moeten daarvoor vooraf toestemming verkrijgen en afspraken maken over een eerlijke vergoeding", must obtain consent first and agree a fair fee. The publishers concede they have signed licences for AI use of their catalogues, and Musixmatch closed deals with all three majors last October. Consent is being enforced and fees are being paid. The chapter did not expect either to arrive this fast.

The third part of the claim is where it holds, and it is the part that matters. Every remedy in play pays the owner of the copyright: damages and settlements for past use, licences for future use. None of them gives the songwriter, the author or the lyricist a claim on the thing the use created. The claim's own test for being refuted is a durable royalty or an equity arrangement paying the people whose work trained the model. Three thousand dollars a book, once, is a price. It is not a share.

The publishers are right that something was taken, and the courts are beginning to agree on what it costs. The chapter's point survives narrower than it was written: even if the publishers win everything they ask for, the model keeps what it learned, the company keeps the model and the people who wrote the words keep a cheque. Who owns the machine?