Anthropic agrees to work with music publishers to prevent copyright infringement

Anthropic has partially resolved the legal dispute that led to the artificial intelligence startup drawing the ire of the music industry. In October 2023, a group of music publishers, including Universal Music and ABKCO, filed a copyright infringement complaint against Anthropic. The group claimed that the company trained its Claude AI model on at least 500 songs to which it owned the rights, and that when promoting them, Claude could reproduce the lyrics of those songs either partially or completely. Among the song lyrics that the publishers said Anthropic infringed included Beyoncé’s “Halo” and Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger.”

In a A condition approved by the court The two sides agreed Thursday to maintain existing guardrails against outputs that reproduce, distribute or display copyright material owned by publishers and implement the same measures when training their future AI models.

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

“Claude was not designed to be used in copyright infringement, and we have several processes in place designed to prevent such infringement,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Engadget. “Our decision to enter into this requirement is consistent with those priorities. We continue to look to demonstrate that, consistent with current copyright law, the use of potentially copyrighted materials in training generative AI models is substantive fair use.” “

As we mentioned, Thursday’s agreement does not fully resolve the original dispute between Anthropic and the music publisher group that sued the company. The latter party is still seeking an injunction against Anthropic to prevent it from using unauthorized versions of song lyrics to train future AI models. A ruling on this matter may be issued sometime within the next few months.

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