Anthropic partially resolved a legal dispute that caused the AI startup to draw the ire from the music industry. In October 2023, a number of music publishers including Universal Music, ABKCO and ABKCO filed a complaint against Anthropic for copyright infringement. The group claimed that Anthropic had trained its Claude AI on at least 500 tracks to which they owned rights, and that when promoted, Claude would be able to reproduce the lyrics in part or full. Anthropic was accused of stealing lyrics from Beyonce’s Halo and Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger”.
Anthropic and the publisher reached a court-approved agreement on Thursday. Anthropic agreed that it would maintain its existing guardrails to prevent outputs from reproducing, distributing or displaying copyright material. It will also implement these same measures in the training of its future AI models.
The company also said that it would respond “expeditiously”to any copyright concerns raised by the group, and promised to provide written answers detailing how and when they plan to address those concerns. If the company does not intend to address a particular issue, they must state this clearly.
Claude isn’t intended to be used to infringe copyright, and we have many processes in place to prevent such infringement.” an Anthropic spokesperson told Engadget. “This stipulation is consistent to our priorities. We are committed to demonstrating that, in accordance with copyright laws, using potentially copied material to train generative AI models constitutes a quintessential “fair use.”
The pact signed on Thursday does not resolve the original dispute between Anthropic, the music publishers who sued the company and their group. The group of music publishers is still seeking a court injunction to stop Anthropic from using unauthorized song lyrics to train its AI models. The ruling could come in the next few weeks.
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