Music publishers fire back at Anthropic in AI copyright lawsuit

Music publishers Universal Music, ABKCO and Concord Music Group have told a Tennessee federal court that Anthropic is relying on falsehoods to defend against a lawsuit

The case is Concord Music Group Inc v. Anthropic PBC, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee [File] | Photo Credit: REUTERS

Music publishers Universal Music, ABKCO and Concord Music Group have told a Tennessee federal court that Anthropic is relying on falsehoods to defend against a lawsuit accusing the artificial intelligence company of misusing hundreds of their song lyrics.

The publishers said in a Wednesday court filing that Anthropic's chatbot Claude had been programmed to generate their lyrics, firing back at what they called "provably false" arguments that any reproduction of their work was a "bug, not a feature" of the program.

"Anthropic's own training data makes clear that it expected its AI models to respond to requests for Publishers' lyrics," the filing said. "In fact, Anthropic trained its models on prompts such as 'What are the lyrics to American Pie by Don McLean?'"

Representatives for Anthropic and the publishers did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

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Copyright owners including authors, visual artists and the New York Times have sued tech companies such as Meta Platforms and Microsoft-backed OpenAI over the use of their work to train generative-AI systems.

The music publishers' lawsuit, filed last October, appears to be the first over song lyrics and the first against Anthropic, which has drawn financial backing from Google , Amazon and former cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried.

The publishers accused Anthropic of infringing their copyrights in lyrics from at least 500 songs by musicians including Beyonce, the Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys. They said the lyrics were part of the "massive amounts of text" that Anthropic scraped from the internet to train Claude.

The publishers asked the court in November for a preliminary order that would block Anthropic's use of their copyrighted material and force the company to implement "guardrails" against reproducing the lyrics.

Anthropic responded last month that it already has measures in place to keep Claude from generating copyrighted material. The company also argued that there was "no evidence" that anyone besides the publishers had reproduced the copyrighted lyrics through Claude.

But the publishers said on Wednesday that Anthropic specifically trained Claude to retrieve lyrics in response to user requests. They said Anthropic's guardrails were "porous," and that the company could abandon them unless the court ordered it to maintain them.

The case is Concord Music Group Inc v. Anthropic PBC, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, No. 3:23-cv-01092.

For the music publishers: Matt Oppenheim, Nick Hailey, Timothy Chung and Jenny Pariser of Oppenheim + Zebrak; Richard Mandel, Jonathan King and Richard Dannay of Cowan Liebowitz & Latman

For Anthropic: Joe Wetzel, Andy Gass, Sy Damle and Alli Stillman of Latham & Watkins