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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.
The suit alleges Claude generates identical or nearly identical
copies of those lyrics when a user asks it 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
the publishers' lyrics when asked a range of requests, including
to "write a song about a certain topic, provide chord
progressions for a given musical composition, or write poetry or
short fiction in the style of a certain artist or songwriter."
For example, the lawsuit said that Claude will 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 allege Anthropic "profits richly" from its
infringement of their repertoires of copyrighted works,
achieving a valuation of $5 billion while paying "nothing" to
publishers or their songwriters.
"Anthropic must not be allowed to flout copyright law," the
publishers said in a court document supporting its request for a
preliminary injunction. "If the court waits until this
litigation ends to address what is already clear -- that
Anthropic is improperly using publishers' copyrighted works --
then the damage will be done."
The publishers have asked the court for monetary damages up of
up to $150,000 per infringed work, and an order to stop the
alleged infringement.
(Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles;Editing by Mary
Milliken and Franklin Paul)
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