A federal judge has approved an interim agreement in a lawsuit that alleges AI company Anthropic used copyrighted song lyrics without authorization or payment while training its system.
Music publishers, including Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic in 2023. The suit alleges that Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot was trained on, and produces results to queries about, lyrics from at least 500 songs by major artists, including Beyoncé and Katy Perry, without Anthropic obtaining permission or compensating rights holders.
On Thursday, US District Judge Eumi Lee signed off on an agreement between the publishers and Anthropic that requires the AI company to maintain its current copyright guardrails — which means not providing lyrics to old or new song lyrics — throughout the litigation process.
The agreement says that nothing prevents Anthropic from “expanding, improving, optimizing, or changing the implementation of such guardrails, provided that such changes do not materially diminish the efficacy of the guardrails.” It also allows publishers to notify Anthropic at any time if they believe the guardrails are insufficient, at which point the company must address their concerns.
The court is expected to decide in the coming months whether songs owned by music publishers can be used for training the AI systems.
The case underscores the tension between generative AI developers and copyright holders, and not just in the music industry. Publishers including The New York Times have sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Microsoft, and The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones have sued Perplexity, all alleging copyright infringement. Other publishers, meanwhile, have struck licensing deals with AI companies including OpenAI and Meta.
Anthropic, backed by Amazon, Google, Salesforce and others, was founded by former OpenAI researchers in 2021. Its system is trained on datasets that may include copyrighted materials such as song lyrics, which has raised questions about fair use and proper licensing.
In a statement shared with CNET, the company emphasized its commitment to copyright compliance, including by entering into the current agreement.
“Claude isn’t designed to be used for copyright infringement, and we have numerous processes in place designed to prevent such infringement,” a spokesperson said. “We continue to look forward to showing that, consistent with existing copyright law, using potentially copyrighted material in the training of generative AI models is a quintessential fair use.”
Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment, but the original lawsuit alleges that Anthropic “unlawfully copies and disseminates vast amounts of copyrighted works.”
“Just like the developers of other technologies that have come before, from the printing press to the copy machine to the web-crawler, AI companies must follow the law,” the lawsuit said.
Anthropic continues to face other legal challenges. Earlier this year, the company was named in a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit from authors who allege that Anthropic “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”