History of Anthropic in Timeline

Anthropic PBC is an AI startup founded in 2021. It develops large language models (LLMs) such as Claude, designed to compete with models like ChatGPT. Anthropic emphasizes AI safety, focusing on researching and developing AI with safety properties and deploying these models responsibly for public use.

1948: Inspiration from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided principles used in Claude 2's constitution, influencing its controlled AI (CAI) to promote freedom, equality, and brotherhood in its responses.

October 18, 2023: Music publishers sue Anthropic for copyright infringement

On October 18, 2023, Anthropic was sued by Concord, Universal, ABKCO, and other music publishers for "systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics," alleging unauthorized use of copyrighted song lyrics in the form of song lyrics by the company. The plaintiffs asked for up to $150,000 for each infringed work and cited examples of Claude outputting copied lyrics from songs such as Katy Perry's "Roar" and Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive".

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January 16, 2024: Anthropic responds to copyright lawsuit

On January 16, 2024, Anthropic responded to the music publishers' copyright infringement lawsuit by claiming that the plaintiffs were not unreasonably harmed and that the examples they noted were merely bugs.

August 2024: Class-action lawsuit filed against Anthropic for copyright infringement

In August 2024, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Anthropic in California for alleged copyright infringement, claiming that Anthropic fed its LLMs with pirated copies of the authors' work.

June 2025: Reddit sues Anthropic for data scraping

In June 2025, Reddit sued Anthropic, alleging that it is scraping data from the website in violation of its user agreement.

June 23, 2025: Court grants summary judgment for Anthropic, orders trial on pirated copies

On June 23, 2025, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California granted summary judgment for Anthropic that the use of digital copies of plaintiffs works (inter alia) for the purpose of training Anthropic's LLMs was a fair use. But it found that Anthropic had used millions of pirated library copies and that such use of pirated copies could not be a fair use. Therefore the case was ordered to go to trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages.