Anthropic says it’s time to end a copyright lawsuit brought by Universal Music Group (UMG) and other publishers over the use of song lyrics to train Claude, its mega-successful artificial intelligence chatbot.
UMG and the other music companies urged a federal judge last month to find that Anthropic’s use of its intellectual property was not “fair use” — a legal tenet that excludes “transformative” uses of a work from copyright protection. Now the AI giant is hitting back, saying in a Monday (April 20) brief of its own that the publishers cannot “meaningfully dispute that training on lyrics (and other copyrighted text) is transformative.”
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According to Anthropic, Claude ingests lyrics alongside trillions of other words to “understand the interrelationships between words and concepts in human language” so it can code software, conduct research and write documents. Anthropic says this is what fair use is all about: turning the publishers’ lyrics into something completely different.
“Claude’s transformative training creates a flexible, general-purpose model that can be used in myriad beneficial ways — the vast majority of which are wholly unrelated to lyrics or music,” write Anthropic’s lawyers.
Anthropic also says the publishers have no evidence that Claude is harming them in the market, which is another element of a judge’s fair use analysis. The AI company points out that the opposite was actually conveyed by UMG’s own chief digital officer, Michael Nash, during the company’s earnings call last month, when he told investors, “Thoughtful analysis will conclude that the impact AI will have on our business will be overwhelmingly net positive.”
In a statement to Billboard on Tuesday (April 21), a rep for the music publishers said, “There is no excuse for Anthropic’s blatant infringement of Publishers’ copyrighted song lyrics.”
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“Anthropic’s recent filing is wrong on the facts and the law in numerous respects, and Publishers look forward to rebutting those arguments and correcting the record when they file their opposition brief,” added the rep.
The question of whether AI training constitutes fair use is an unsettled legal question at the heart of dozens of ongoing copyright cases that have been filed against these booming new tech companies in recent years.
The music industry entered this battle on two fronts: publishers led by UMG sued Anthropic in 2023, and then all three major label groups brought their own copyright cases against AI music generators Suno and Udio in 2024. The Suno and Udio lawsuits also remain ongoing, despite some partial licensing settlements inked at the end of last year.
