A group of music publishers, including entertainment giant Universal Music Group, on Oct. 18 sued Anthropic — which has a $4 billion deal to provide foundation models to Amazon — for allegedly distributing copyrighted lyrics within its generative AI model Claude 2.
The publishers claim that despite Anthropic purporting to be an “AI safety and research” company, its model “generates identical or nearly identical copies” of lyrics.
For example, when users ask Claude to provide lyrics to popular songs such as “Sweet Home Alabama” by rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Halo” from Beyonce and “Uptown Funk,” popularized by Bruno Mars, the chatbot provides either all or most of the lyrics, according to the lawsuit.
The publishers also accuse Anthropic of depriving them and their songwriters of “control over their copyrighted works and the hard-earned benefits of their creative endeavors,” while competing against platforms that license and respect the copyright law.
The Anthropic suit joins a host of lawsuits against other AI companies. For example, Getty Images sued generative AI image model developer Stability AI in January for allegedly infringing on intellectual property rights, including copyright.
OpenAI, perhaps the top generative AI developer with an $11 billion partnership with Microsoft, also faces a lawsuit for breaching copyright laws after noted authors claimed the AI vendor generated summaries of their work.
