Anthropic agrees to work with music publishers to prevent copyright infringement

Anthropic resolved a legal dispute that caused AI startups to upset the music industry. In October 2023, a group of music publishers, including Universal Music and ABKCO, filed a copyright infringement complaint against Anthropic. The team said that the company trained its Claude AI model on at least 500 songs it had copyrighted and that, when prompted, Claude could reproduce the lyrics of the songs in part or in full. Among the lyrics that publishers said Anthropic broke were Beyoncé’s “Halo” and Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger.”

In a a decision approved by the court The two sides reached an agreement on Thursday, with Anthropic agreeing to maintain existing protections against publishing, distributing or displaying the publisher’s documents and using them to train future AI models.

At the same time, the company said it would respond “promptly” to the group’s copyright concerns and promised to provide answers detailing how and when it plans to address their concerns. If the company wants to stay out of trouble, it needs to make its mission clear.

An Anthropic spokesperson told Engadget: “Claude is not intended to be used for copyright infringement, and we have several measures in place to prevent such infringements,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Engadget. We’re still waiting to demonstrate that, consistent with existing law, using copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence is fair use.”

As noted, Thursday’s settlement does not resolve the original dispute between Anthropic and a group of music publishers who sued the company. The latter group still wants an injunction to prevent Anthropic from using illegal copies of music tracks to train future AI models. A decision on the matter is likely to come sometime in the next few months.

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