Three major music publishers, Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO, have sued AI company Anthropic for copyright infringement. The publishers allege that Anthropic copied and distributed lyrics from at least 500 songs without permission, using them to train its AI chatbot Claude.
The lawsuit is the latest in a growing body of legal challenges to the use of copyrighted material to train AI systems. Last month, the Authors Guild sued OpenAI for using copyrighted books to train its GPT language model.
The music publishers argue that Anthropic’s use of their lyrics is not protected by fair use because it is commercial in nature and harms their ability to profit from their works. They also allege that Claude generates answers that contain copyrighted lyrics even when it is specifically asked not to do so.
The publishers are seeking a court order to block Anthropic from continuing to use their copyrighted material and up to $150,000 in damages per infringement.
Anthropic has not yet commented on the lawsuit, but it is likely to argue that its use of copyrighted lyrics is protected by fair use. The fair use doctrine allows for the limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder for certain purposes, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research.
The sources for this piece include an article in HollywoodReporter.