Anthropic has asked a US court to deny a request made by a group of music publishers who want an injunction to force the AI company to stop its chatbot Claude from spitting out their lyrics and to ensure that their songs are not used in any future AI training.
In a legal filing earlier this month, the music companies claimed that Anthropric has “already usurped publishers’ and songwriters’ control over the use of their works, denied them credit, and jeopardised their reputations”. If Anthropic is allowed to continue using lyrics, said the publishers, the “wanton copying” would “irreversibly damage the licensing market for lyrics, publishers’ relationships with licensees, and publishers’ goodwill with the songwriters they represent”.
While the broader lawsuit filed by the publishers is going through the courts, they want a judge to force an immediate stop to what they see as copyright infringement by Anthropic: both the use of their lyrics in the AI company’s training datasets and the alleged outputting of their lyrics by Claude.
Anthropic disputes that using the publishers’ works in its training processes constitutes copyright infringement and denies that Claude outputs the publishers’ lyrics, except when the publishers themselves enter very specific leading prompts. However, for now it is making different arguments for why the publishers’ request for a preliminary injunction should be denied.
The injunction should be denied for two reasons, says Anthropic in a new court filing. Firstly, it argues that it has already voluntarily put in place measures to ensure that Claude does not output existing lyrics, even when the publishers input very specific prompts.
Secondly, if the court case does end with Anthropic being found liable for copyright infringement, then the publishers will get damages, and those damages will provide the publishers with proper compensation for any harm that has been caused by the alleged infringement.
The publishers themselves, it says, have “effectively conceded that additional guardrails Anthropic has implemented are effective” at stopping Claude from outputting existing lyrics. That claim is based on the fact the publishers want the injunction to simply demand that those existing guardrails be maintained. Therefore the music companies “cannot show any ongoing or future harm they will suffer” in this domain, Anthropic argues, “let alone ‘irreparable’ harm”.
As for the injunction relating to the use of the publishers’ lyrics in Anthropic’s training, it says that the dispute over whether AI companies need to get permission to use existing content when training their models is core to “roughly two dozen copyright infringement cases around the country”, and in no other case are the copyright owners seeking a preliminary injunction.
And that includes the lawsuits filed by the major record companies against Suno and Udio. Universal Music is involved in those cases on the label side of its business and this one through its music publishing division. “It speaks volumes that no other plaintiff - including the parent company record label of one of the plaintiffs in this case - has sought preliminary injunctive relief from this conduct”, Anthropic writes.
Plus, Anthropic argues, the publishers’ own conduct shows that the argument that urgent action is needed to stop the harm caused by Claude is not credible. When they discovered that Claude could be prompted to output existing lyrics, they failed to inform Anthropic, instead sitting on that information for five months before filing a lawsuit.
Then they filed their lawsuit in Tennessee which, Anthropic argues, was clearly the wrong forum, resulting in another self-inflicted delay after the AI company successfully got the litigation moved to California.The publishers took that risk, it says, because they thought fighting the case in Tennessee would work to their advantage. This “failed attempt at litigation gamesmanship is entirely of their own making and by itself warrants denying their motion” for preliminary injunction.
This is Anthropic’s second court filing this month in relation to its legal battle with the publishers. An earlier filing called on the court to dismiss copyright claims relating to Claude outputting lyrics and allegations that Anthropic has mishandled copyright management information. That would mean that the only remaining dispute would be over Anthropic’s use of copyright protected lyrics in its training processes.