Music labels clash with Claude over copyrighted lyrics

Anthropic claims Claude users prompt the chatbot to produce lyrics and the company only has secondary liability for using copyrighted works.SAN JOSE, Calif. (CN) — In a high-stakes showdown over artificial intelligence training on copyrighted material, major music publishers sounded the alarm Wednesday that Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude could potentially eat up all music industry revenue from licensing.In a hearing for cross-motions for summary judgment, Concord Music Group attorney Matthew Oppenheim said Claude reproduces copyrighted material — sometimes verbatim — calling it infringement of “one of the most highly creative, expressive uses under copyright.”Oppenheim targeted “derivative” or mashup works, where Claude uses copyrighted lyrics to come up with answers that reference or include excerpts of the material, as well as “synthetic” works, where Claude creates a new song in the same genre or style based on an artist’s work, as violations of the Copyright Act. He said Claude’s generation of “synthetic” songs end up in competition with human artists’ work, diluting the music marketplace.“It’s not curing cancer, it’s to create other lyrics,” he said. “It couldn’t do it if it didn’t have the lyrics in the database.”Concord Music Group and fellow plaintiffs Capitol CMG, Universal Music, Songs of Universal, Polygram Publishing and Abkco Music sued Anthropic in October 2023, arguing the booming tech company’s AI training wasn’t a justification to use copyrighted lyrics. They want Anthropic to obtain a license for copyrighted works if Claude is going to use them.Additionally, the music labels claim Anthropic removes its content management information in order to conceal its infringement for verbatim generation of copyrighted lyrics.U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee asked Oppenheim if his argument would mean music publishers would have a monopoly of lyrics — no one, including AI, could create new works based on a style of an old, copyrighted one because they did not pay a license to reproduce the work?“Copyright is a monopoly by nature,” said Oppenheim. “That’s not a bad word in the context of copyright.”Anthropic attorney Sonal Mehta argued her client only has secondary liability for using copyrighted works because Claude users are “pushing the button” for prompts on song lyrics, or to generate a song like Taylor Swift’s music. She also said the plaintiffs misunderstand how large language models work, claiming they aren’t taking lyrics specifically, but “vast, vast amounts” of content.“It allows it to make probabilistic determinations based on how human language maps,” she said. “Every input weighs on how the model will predict.”Mehta also insisted the “synthetic” songs Claude generates are new material, copyrightable in its own right under the law, and doesn’t displace human artists’ material.“There isn’t anything in the record that shows doom for the music industry,” she said. She claimed, according to experts, Claude produced no negative impacts to licensing and doesn’t affect licensed lyric search engines such as Genius and LyricFind.In January 2025, Lee ordered Anthropic to maintain existing copyright guardrails for Claude’s input and output and apply them to future models, but the Joe Biden appointee didn’t broadly stop training on copyrighted lyrics. Last October, the judge denied Anthropic’s motion to dismiss, agreeing with the labels that Anthropic benefits financially because “Anthropic is paid every time … end users submit a request for publishers’ song lyrics, and it is paid again every time its Claude API generates output copying and relying on those lyrics,” Lee wrote in the denial.This case isn’t the first time Anthropic has been on the legal hook for its AI. In 2025, Reddit sued the company over supposedly training Claude on its users’ data, and the company settled for $1.5 billion in a landmark case brought by book authors whose copyrighted works were downloaded and stored by the AI system. It was the largest settlement in the history of U.S. copyright cases.At the end of several hours of arguments, Lee took the issue under submission without indicating her thoughts on summary judgment.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads