Anthropic fires back at music publishers' AI copyright lawsuit

Jan 17 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has asked a Tennessee federal court to reject an early bid by three music publishers to stop it from using and reproducing their song lyrics through its chatbot Claude.

Anthropic told the court, on Tuesday that Universal Music (UMG.AS),, ABKCO and Concord Music Group could not prove they were being irreparably harmed.   It also argued that the publishers had brought their lawsuit against the company in the wrong court.

The publishers' attorney Matt Oppenheim said on Wednesday that they were confident in their request and "believe that Anthropic's infringement should be stopped."

Representatives for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the filing.

Many copyright owners including authors, visual artists and the New York Times have sued tech companies such as Meta Platforms (META.O),  and Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O),  OpenAI over the use of their work to train generative-AI systems.

The music publishers' lawsuit, filed last October, appears to be the first over song lyrics and the first against Anthropic, which has drawn financial backing from Google (GOOGL.O), Amazon (AMZN.O), and former cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried.

The complaint accused Anthropic of infringing the publishers' copyrights in lyrics from at least 500 songs by musicians including Beyonce, the Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys.   The publishers claim Anthropic misused the lyrics as part of the "massive amounts of text" that it scrapes from the internet to train Claude to respond to human prompts.

The publishers asked the court in November for a preliminary injunction to block the use of their copyrighted material to train Claude and force the company to implement "guardrails" against reproducing their lyrics.

Anthropic responded on Wednesday that it already has guardrails to prevent Claude from generating copyrighted material.

"If those measures failed in some instances in the past, that would have been a 'bug,' not a 'feature,' of the product," Anthropic said.

The company also argued that there was "no evidence" that any other Claude users "entered prompts that resulted in Plaintiffs' lyrics being shown to them."

"Normal people would not use one of the world's most powerful and cutting-edge generative AI tools to show them what they could more reliably and quickly access using ubiquitous web browsers," Anthropic said.

The company also said it was "confident" that its AI training makes fair use of copyrighted material and would show how the publishers' case "misconceives the technology and the law alike."

The case is Concord Music Group Inc v. Anthropic PBC, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, No. 3:23-cv-01092.