Three major music publishers suing Anthropic over its use of lyrics to train AI systems have reached an agreement with the Amazon-backed company to partially resolve a pending preliminary injunction. .
U.S. District Judge Yumi Lee told Anthropic on Thursday that the company’s Claude AI chatbot can provide lyrics for publisher-owned songs or create lyrics for new songs based on copyrighted material. Both sides signed an agreement that requires the maintenance of existing guardrails that prevent
Anthropic said in a statement that Claude was “not designed to be used for copyright infringement, and we have numerous processes in place designed to prevent such infringement.” It further states: “Our decision to enter into this provision is consistent with these priorities. We look forward to demonstrating that its use in training AI models is exemplary fair use.”
Publishers including Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in Tennessee in 2023 for copyright infringement for training their AI systems on the lyrics of at least 500 songs by artists such as Katy Perry and the Rolling Stones. The suit was filed in state federal court. And Beyoncé. In one example, when asked for the lyrics to Perry’s “Roar,” which Concord owns, Claude provided a nearly identical copy of the song’s lyrics, according to the complaint.
At the heart of the lawsuit was the claim that there was already a remote and pre-existing market for plagiarizing lyrics without consent or payment. The publisher pointed to music lyric aggregators and websites that license the songs.
The lawsuit marks the first legal action brought by a music publisher against an AI company over the inclusion of lyrics in large-scale language models.
Under the agreement, Anthropic will apply guardrails already in place to training new AI systems. The agreement also provides a means for music publishers to intervene if the guardrails don’t work as intended.
“Publishers must ensure that guardrails effectively prevent output that reproduces, distributes, or displays all or part of the lyrics of songs owned or controlled by the publisher, or that creates derivative works based on those songs. You may notify Anthropic in writing that you do not have the application status. “Anthropic will respond promptly to the publisher and begin an investigation into these allegations. The publisher will cooperate in good faith.”
In a court filing, Anthropic argued that existing guardrails make it unlikely that future users would encourage Claude to create significant portions of the works in litigation. A company spokesperson said these consist of “a series of technical and other measures aimed at preventing users from simply regurgitating training data to Claude at every level of the development lifecycle.” He said there was.
The court is expected to rule in the coming months on whether to issue a preliminary injunction barring Anthropic from training future models on lyrics owned by the publisher.
