In a legal move aimed at safeguarding their copyrighted song lyrics, three major music publishing giants, Universal Music, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO Music, are urging a federal court to issue a preliminary injunction against artificial intelligence company Anthropic. The motion, filed on Demands that Anthropic be barred from reproducing or distributing the copyrighted lyrics and calls for the implementation of effective measures to prevent the use of these works to train future AI models.

Anthropic, a San Francisco-based company, is accused of engaging in "systematic and widespread" infringement of copyrighted song lyrics. The lawsuit, initiated on October 18 in 2023, alleges that Anthropic utilized copyrighted lyrics from numerous songs without proper authorization. The publishers contend that Anthropic incorporated these lyrics into the vast amounts of text it scrapes from the internet to train its AI assistant, known as "Claude," to respond to human prompts.

The lawsuit asserts that Claude is capable of generating identical or nearly identical copies of copyrighted lyrics when prompted by users to provide song lyrics, citing examples such as "Sweet Home Alabama" or "Every Breath You Take." Notably, the generative AI, according to the lawsuit, can even offer responses containing copyrighted lyrics when tasked with requests such as writing a song, providing chord progressions, or creating poetry in the style of a specific artist.

An illustrative example in the legal filing points out that Claude would present relevant lyrics from Don McLean's "American Pie" when asked to compose a song about the death of rock pioneer Buddy Holly.

The publishers claim that Anthropic has "profited richly" from the unauthorized use of their copyrighted works, achieving a valuation of $5 billion without compensating publishers or songwriters. The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic's success is directly linked to the exploitation of vast amounts of copyrighted material scraped from the internet.

Anthropic has not issued an immediate comment in response to the legal proceedings.

In addition to seeking a halt on the alleged infringement, the publishers are requesting monetary damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work. The legal action highlights the growing challenges and ethical concerns surrounding the use of AI technologies in the creative domain, as companies like Anthropic face increasing scrutiny for their methods of training AI models.