Anthropic reaches deal with music publishers over lyric dispute

By Jess Weatherbed , a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.

Anthropic has made a deal to settle parts of a copyright infringement lawsuit ​​brought against the maker of the Claude AI model for allegedly distributing protected song lyrics. The agreement was signed off by US District Judge Eumi Lee on Thursday, requiring Anthropic to apply existing guardrails in the training of future AI models and to establish a procedure for music publishers to intervene when copyright infringement is suspected.

In October 2023, several music publishers including Universal Music Group, ABKCO, Concord Music Group, and Greg Nelson Music filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic for allegedly training its AI system on lyrics from at least 500 protected songs. According to the complaint, when Claude was prompted for the lyrics to songs like Beyoncé’s “Halo,” Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk,” and “Moves like Jagger” by Maroon 5, the chatbot provided responses “that contain all or significant portions of those lyrics.”

While the music publishers acknowledged that platforms like Genius already distribute lyrics online, they noted that those sites pay a licensing fee to use the protected works. Anthropic “intentionally removed or altered copyright management information” from the impacted songs when ingesting data found on those sites to train its AI models, according to the lawsuit filing.

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