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Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has asked a Tennessee federal court to reject a bid by three music publishers to stop it from using and reproducing their song lyrics through its chatbot Claude. The company stated that the publishers could not prove they were being irreparably harmed and brought the lawsuit in the wrong court.

The publishers’ lawsuit, filed in October, accused Anthropic of infringing the copyrights of lyrics from at least 500 songs. They asked the court in November for a preliminary injunction to block the use of their copyrighted material to train Claude. Anthropic responded by stating that it already has guardrails to prevent Claude from generating copyrighted material and that there was “no evidence” that any other Claude users “entered prompts that resulted in Plaintiffs’ lyrics being shown to them.”

The company also argued that its AI training makes fair use of copyrighted material, and it is confident that it would demonstrate this in the case. The lawsuit appears to be the first over song lyrics and the first against Anthropic, which has backing from Google, Amazon, and former cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried.

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. Representing the music publishers are attorneys from Oppenheim + Zebrak and Cowan Liebowitz & Latman. For Anthropic, attorneys from Latham & Watkins are representing the company.

This news story was reported by Blake Brittain in Washington and was first published by Reuters.



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