Anthropic tops $61B despite copyright lawsuits
The valuation of AI startup Anthropic tops $61B despite copyright lawsuits by songwriters, labels, authors and other creators over unchecked data scraping.
Anthropic tops $61B despite copyright lawsuits
Op-ed by Chris Castle from Music Tech Solutions
If you’ve read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, you’ll be familiar with the Congo Free State, a private colony of Belgian King Leopold II that is today largely the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When I say “private” I mean literally privately owned by his Leopoldness. Why would old King Leo be so interested in owning a private colony in Africa? Why for the money, of course. Leo had to move some pieces around the board and get other countries to allow him to get away with essentially “buying” the place, if “buying” is the right description.
So Leo held an international conference in Berlin to discuss the idea and get international buy-in, kind of like the World Economic Forum with worse food and no skiing. Rather than acknowledging his very for-profit intention to ravage the Congo for ivory (aka slaughtering elephants) and rubber (the grisly extraction of which was accomplished by uncompensated slave labor) with brutal treatment of all concerned, Leo convinced the assembled nations that his intentions were humanitarian and philanthropic. You know, don’t be evil. Just lie.
Of course, however much King Leopold may have foreshadowed our sociopathic overlords from Silicon Valley, it must be said that Leo’s real envy won’t so much be the money as what he could have done with AI himself had he only known. Oh well, he just had to make do with Kurtz.
Which bring us to AI in general and Anthropic in particular. Anthropic’s corporate slogan is equally humanitarian and philanthropic: “Anthropic is an AI research company that focuses on the safety and alignment of AI systems with human values.” Oh yes, all very jolly.
All very innocent and high minded, until you get punched in the face (to coin a phrase). It turns out–quelle horreur–that Anthropic stands accused of massive copyright infringement rather than lauded for its humanitarianism. Even more shocking? The company’s valuation is going through the stratosphere! These innocents surely must be falsely accused! The VC’s are voting with their bucks, so they wouldn’t put their shareholders’ money or limited’s money on the line for a–RACKETEER INFLUENCED CORRUPT ORGANIZATION?!?
Bartz v Anthropic ComplaintDownload
Not only have authors brought this class action against Anthropic which is both Google’s stalking horse and cats paw to mix a metaphor, but the songwriters and music publishers have sued them as well. Led by Concord and Universal, the publishers have sued for largely the same reasons as the authors but for their quite distinct copyrights.
Concord and Universal v Anthropic ComplaintDownload
So let’s understand the game that’s being played here–as the Artist Rights Institute submitted in a comment to the UK Intellectual Property Office in the IPO’s current consultation on AI and copyright, the delay is the thing. And thanks to Anthropic, we can now put a valuation on the delay since the $4,000,000,000 the company raised in November 2024: $3,500,000,000. This one company is valued at $61.5 billion, roughly half of the entire creative industries in the UK and roughly equal to the entire U.S. music industry. No wonder delay is their business model.
“copyright and AI must be discussed together”
However antithetical, copyright and AI must be discussed together for a very specific reason: Artificial intelligence platforms operated by Google, Microsoft/OpenAI, Meta and the like have scraped and ingested works of authorship from baby pictures to Sir Paul McCartney as fast and as secretly as possible. And the AI platforms know that the longer they can delay accountability, the more of the world’s culture they will have devoured—or as they might say, the more data they will have ingested. And Not to mention the billions in venture capital they will have raised, just like Anthropic. For the good of humanity, of course, just like old King Leo.
As the Hon. Alison Hume, MP recently told Parliament, this theft is massive and has already happened, another example of why any “opt out” scheme (as had been suggested by the UK government) has failed before it starts:
This week, I discovered that the subtitles from one of my episodes of New Tricks have been scraped and are being used to create learning materials for artificial intelligence. Along with thousands of other films and television shows, my original work is being used by generative AI to write scripts which one day may replace versions produced by mere humans like me.
This is theft, and it’s happening on an industrial scale. As the law stands, artificial intelligence companies don’t have to be transparent about what they are stealing.[1]
Any delay[2] in prosecuting AI platforms simply increases their de facto “text and data mining” safe harbor while they scrape ever more of world culture. As Ms. Hume states, this massive “training” has transferred value to these data-hungry mechanical beasts to a degree that confounds human understanding of its industrial scale infringement. This theft dwarfs even the Internet piracy that drove broadband penetration, Internet advertising and search platforms in the 1999-2010 period. It must be said that for Big Tech, commerce and copyright are once again inherently linked for even greater profit.
As the Right Honourable Baroness Kidron said in her successful opposition to the UK Government’s AI legislation in the House of Lords:
The Government are doing this not because the current law does not protect intellectual property rights, nor because they do not understand the devastation it will cause, but because they are hooked on the delusion that the UK’s best interests and economic future align with those of Silicon Valley.[3]
Baroness Kidron identifies a question of central importance that mankind is forced to consider by the sheer political brute force of the AI lobbying steamroller: What if AI is another bubble like the Dot Com bubble? AI is, to a large extent, a black box utterly lacking in transparency much less recordkeeping or performance metrics. As Baroness Kidron suggests, governments and the people who elect them are making a very big bet that AI is not pursuing an ephemeral bubble like the last time.
Indeed, the AI hype has the earmarks of a bubble, just as the Dot Com bubble did. Baroness Kidron also reminds us of these fallacious economic arguments surrounding AI:
The Prime Minister cited an IMF report that claimed that, if fully realised, the gains from AI could be worth up to an average of £47 billion to the UK each year over a decade. He did not say that the very same report suggested that unemployment would increase by 5.5% over the same period. This is a big number—a lot of jobs and a very significant cost to the taxpayer. Nor does that £47 billion account for the transfer of funds from one sector to another. The creative industries contribute £126 billion per year to the economy. I do not understand the excitement about £47 billion when you are giving up £126 billion.[4]
As Hon. Chris Kane, MP said in Parliament, the Government runs the risk of enabling a wealth transfer that itself is not producing new value but would make old King Leo feel right at home:
Copyright protections are not a barrier to AI innovation and competition, but they are a safeguard for the work of an industry worth £125 billion per year, employing over two million people. We can enable a world where much of this value is transferred to a handful of big tech firms or we can enable a win-win situation for the creative industries and AI developers, one where they work together based on licensed relationships with remuneration and transparency at its heart.
[1] Paul Revoir, AI companies are committing ‘theft’ on an ‘industrial scale’, claims Labour MP – who has written for TV series including New Tricks, Daily Mail (Feb. 12, 2025) available at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14391519/AI-companies-committing-theft-industrial-scale-claims-Labour-MP-wrote-TV-shows-including-New-Tricks.html
[2] See, e.g., Kerry Muzzey, [YouTube Delay Tactics with DMCA Notices], Twitter (Feb. 13, 2020) available at https://twitter.com/kerrymuzzey/status/1228128311181578240 (Film composer with Content ID account notes “I have a takedown pending against a heavily-monetized YouTube channel w/a music asset that’s been fine & in use for 7 yrs & 6 days. Suddenly today, in making this takedown, YT decides “there’s a problem w/my metadata on this piece.” There’s no problem w/my metadata tho. This is the exact same delay tactic they threw in my way every single time I applied takedowns against broadcast networks w/monetized YT channels….And I attached a copy of my copyright registration as proof that it’s just fine.”); Zoë Keating, [Content ID secret rules], Twitter (Feb. 6. 2020) available at https://twitter.com/zoecello/status/1225497449269284864 (Independent artist with Content ID account states “[YouTube’s Content ID] doesn’t find every video, or maybe it does but then it has selective, secret rules about what it ultimately claims for me.”).
[3] The Rt. Hon. Baroness Kidron, Speech regarding Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL] Amendment 44A, House of Lords (Jan. 28, 2025) available at https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords%E2%80%8F/2025-01-28/debates/9BEB4E59-CAB1-4AD3-BF66-FE32173F971D/Data(UseAndAccess)Bill(HL)#contribution-9A4614F3-3860-4E8E-BA1E-53E932589CBF
[4] Id.
