Anthropic agrees to work with music publishers to prevent copyright infringement

Anthropic partially resolves a legal dispute that caused the artificial intelligence startup to draw the ire of the music industry. In October 2023, a group of music publishers, including Universal Music and ABKCO, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic. The group claimed that the company had trained its Claude AI model on at least 500 songs to which they owned copyrights, and that after promotion, Claude could copy the lyrics of those songs in part or in full. The lyrics the publisher claims Anthropic infringes include Beyoncé’s “Halo” and Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger.”

in a court approved stipulations The parties reached a consensus on Thursday, with Anthropic agreeing to maintain existing safeguards against the copying, distribution or display of output from copyrighted material owned by the publisher, and to implement the same measures when training future artificial intelligence models.

Meanwhile, the company said it would respond “expeditiously” to any copyright concerns from the group and promised to provide written responses detailing how and when it plans to address their concerns. If a company intends not to address an issue, it must clearly state its intention to do so.

“Claude was not designed to infringe copyright, and we have a number of processes in place to prevent such infringement,” a spokesperson for Anthropic told Engadget. “Our decision to make this provision is consistent with those priorities.” We continue to expect demonstrations that use of potentially copyrightable material in the training of generative AI models is typically fair use, consistent with existing copyright law.

As noted, Thursday’s agreement does not fully resolve the original differences between Anthropic and the group of music publishers that sued the company. The latter is still seeking an injunction against Anthropic to prevent it from using unauthorized copies of lyrics to train future artificial intelligence models. A ruling on the matter is likely to be made in the coming months.

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