Record Company Sues Anthropic for Copyright Infringement of Song Lyrics

The three companies filed a lawsuit against Anthropic (photo: x @AnthropicAI)

JAKARTA - Three music recording companies applied to a federal court judge to issue a temporary injunction that would prevent artificial intelligence company Anthropic from reproducing or distributing the lyrics of their copyrighted songs.

Universal Music, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO Music filed a motion on Thursday November 16 to ask the court to require Anthropic to "implement effective guardrails" that would prevent the company's artificial intelligence models from reproducing or distributing copyrighted song lyrics. It also prevents the company from using the work to train artificial intelligence models in the future.

"While we cannot comment on the substance of the litigation, our focus remains the same — to build reliable, interpretable and steerable artificial intelligence systems," Anthropic said in a statement quoted by VOI from Reuters.

The three companies filed a lawsuit against Anthropic on October 18, accusing the San Francisco company of "systematic and widespread" copyright infringement of their song lyrics. They claim that Anthropic used copyrighted song lyrics in an “untold number” of songs without permission as part of a “massive amount of text” it scraped from the internet to train its artificial intelligence assistant, known as “Claude,” to respond to human requests .

The lawsuit claims that Claude produced identical or nearly identical copies of the lyrics when users asked him to provide the lyrics to songs such as "Sweet Home Alabama" or "Every Breath You Take."

Anthropic's Generative AI will even offer responses containing publisher lyrics when asked to perform various requests, including "write a song about a particular topic, provide a chord progression for a particular musical composition, or write a poem or short story in the style of a particular artist or songwriter."

For example, the lawsuit alleges that Claude would provide relevant lyrics from Don McLean's "American Pie" when asked to write a song about the death of rock pioneer Buddy Holly.

The publishers claim Anthropic "made huge profits" from infringing their repertoire of copyrighted works, reaching a valuation of US$5 billion (IDR 77.1 trillion), while paying "nil" to their publishers or songwriters.

"Anthropic must not be allowed to violate copyright law," the publisher said in court documents supporting their request for a temporary injunction. "If the court waits until this litigation is over to address what is obvious — that Anthropic is unlawfully using the publisher's copyrighted work — then the damage will be done."

The plaintiffs have asked the court to award monetary damages of up to 150,000 US dollars (IDR 2.3 billion) per infringed work, and an order to stop the alleged infringement.