Anthropic has partially resolved a legal dispute that caused the artificial intelligence startup to draw the ire of the music industry. In October 2023, a group of music publishers, including Universal Music and ABKCO, filed a copyright complaint against Anthropic. The band claimed that the company trained its artificial intelligence model Claude on at least 500 songs to which it had rights, and that Claude could reproduce some or all of the lyrics to those tracks when promoting it. Among the lyrics Anthropic said it violated were Beyoncé's “Halo” and Maroon 5's “Moves Like Jagger.”
IN court-approved clause The two sides agreed Thursday that Anthropic agreed to maintain existing restrictions on products that reproduce, distribute or display copyrighted material owned by publishers, and to apply the same measures when training its future artificial intelligence models.
At the same time, the company said it would respond “promptly” to any of the group's copyright concerns and promised to provide written responses detailing how and when it plans to address their concerns. Where a company intends not to resolve an issue, it must clearly state its intention to do so.
“Claude is not intended to be used for copyright infringement purposes, and we have numerous processes designed to prevent such infringement,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Engadget. “Our decision to accept this condition is consistent with these priorities. We continue to hope to demonstrate that, under current copyright law, the use of potentially copyrighted material in training generative AI models constitutes a typical fair use.”
As mentioned, Thursday's settlement does not fully resolve the initial disagreements between Anthropic and the group of music publishers that sued the company. The latter party is still seeking an injunction against Anthropic to prevent it from using unauthorized copies of song lyrics to train future artificial intelligence models. A decision on this issue could be made sometime in the next few months.
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