A legal battle between music publishers and artificial intelligence company Anthropic took a surprising turn on Thursday, Jan. 2. Now, a partial agreement could reshape how AI interacts with copyrighted material.
The dispute began in 2023 when Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and other major publishers sued Anthropic, accusing the AI safety and research company of copyright infringement.
Anthropic, founded by siblings and former OpenAI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei, specializes in building systems like its chatbot, “Claude.”
In February 2024, the music publishers told a Tennessee federal court Claude was trained using prompts such as, “What are the lyrics to ‘American Pie’ by Don McLean?”
They alleged Anthropic’s training methods infringed on lyrics from over 500 songs, including works by artists such as Beyoncé and The Beach Boys.
On Thursday, a U.S. district judge approved an agreement requiring Anthropic to maintain its existing safeguards. These guardrails prevent Claude from generating copyrighted content owned by the publishers or creating new lyrics based on protected material.
The agreement also allows the publishers to notify Anthropic at any time if these safeguards fail.
The case echoes a story reported in December, where companies like Anthropic and Apple faced accusations of using thousands of movies and TV episodes to train AI models.
That controversy prompted the Writers Guild of America to write to major Hollywood studios, urging action against AI-driven plagiarism.
