• by Colin Kirkland , January 3, 2025

In response to a copyright infringement complaint filed by a handful of music publishers, including Universal Music and ABKCO in October 2023, artificial intelligence giant Anthropic has agreed to train its future AI models to avoid copying licensed music.

Anthropic's AI model Claude was trained on at least 500 songs Universal and ABKCO had official rights to, according to the publishers. Claude, they claimed, was able to reproduce exact lyrics of tracks like Beyoncé’s “Halo” and Maroon 5's “Moves Like Jagger,” either partially or in full when prompted.

Partially resolving the lawsuit, Anthropic agreed to enforce guardrails against outputs that reproduce, distribute or display copyright material owned by the publishers, and said it would respond “expeditiously” to all copyright concerns from the record companies.

While the agreement was approved by U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee on Thursday, it is just one piece of an ongoing case in California federal court accusing the Amazon-backed AI company of misusing hundreds of popular songs. 

“Claude isn’t designed to be used for copyright infringement, and we have numerous processes in place designed to prevent such infringement,” an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement.

However, the spokesperson added that using potentially copyrighted material in the training of Claude and other generative AI models “is a quintessential fair use.”

If further copyright issues arise, the agreement makes clear that publishers may notify Anthropic in writing that its guardrails are “not effectively preventing output that reproduces, distributes, or displays, in whole or in part, the lyrics to compositions owned or controlled by publishers, or creates derivative works based on those compositions.”