Music Publishers allege that Anthropic has violated copyright laws by using hundreds songs to train its Claude bot.
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The federal judge approved an interim agreement to settle a lawsuit alleging that AI company Anthropic used song lyrics copyrighted without authorization or payment when training its system.
Music Publishers, including Universal Music Group (UMG), Concord Music Group (CMG) and ABKCO filed a lawsuit against Anthropic. Copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Anthropic by 2023. The suit alleges Anthropic’s Claude AI bot was trained and produces results for queries about lyrics from at least 50 songs by major artists including Beyonce, Katy Perry and Katy Perry without Anthropic obtaining consent or compensating right holders.
On Thursday, US District Judge Eumi Lee signed off on An agreement was reached between Anthropic and the publishers that required the AI company to maintain their current copyright guardrails – which means not providing lyrics for old or new song lyrics – throughout the litigation process.
According to the agreement, Anthropic is not prohibited from “expanding, improving, optimizing, or changing the implementation of such guardrails, provided that such changes do not materially diminish the efficacy of the guardrails.” They can also notify Anthropic if they feel the guardrails insufficient at any time.
In the coming months, the court will decide whether songs owned and licensed by music publishers may be used to train AI systems.
This case highlights the tension between generative AI creators and copyright holders. It is not limited to the music industry. Publishers such as The New York Times and Microsoft sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI, while The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, and Perplexity sued Perplexity for copyright infringement. Other publishers have also struck licensing agreements with AI companies such as OpenAI and Meta. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, and is backed by Amazon Google Salesforce, among others. Its system is trained using datasets that could include copyrighted material such as song lyrics. This has raised questions regarding fair use and proper licensing. In a CNET-shared statement, the company stressed its commitment to compliance with copyright, including through the current agreement. A spokesperson confirmed that the agreement was signed in 19659016. Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO did not immediately respond to requests for comments, but the original suit alleges that Anthropic is “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,” according to the lawsuit. Anthropic is still facing legal challenges
. Anthropic was named earlier this year in a class action copyright infringement suit by authors who claimed that Anthropic “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”
