Music publishers ask court to halt AI company Anthropic's use of lyrics

Three music publishers are asking a federal court judge to issue a preliminary injunction that would prevent artificial intelligence company Anthropic from reproducing or distributing their copyrighted song lyrics.

Three music publishers are asking a federal court judge to issue a preliminary injunction that would prevent artificial intelligence company Anthropic from reproducing or distributing their copyrighted song lyrics.

Universal Music, Concord Music Group and ABKCO Music filed a motion Thursday asking for the court to require Anthropic to "implement effective guardrails" that would prevent the company's AI models from reproducing or distributing the copyrighted song lyrics, and to prevent the company from using these works to train future AI models.

“While we can’t comment on the substance of the litigation, our focus remains the same — to build reliable, interpretable and steerable AI systems,” Anthropic said in a statement to Reuters.

The three publishers filed a suit against Anthropic on Oct. 18, which accused the San Francisco company of "systematic and widespread" infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics. The publishers claim Anthropic used the copyrighted lyrics to "innumerable" songs without permission as part of the "massive amounts of text" that it scrapes from the internet to train its artificial intelligence assistant, known as "Claude," to respond to human prompts.