Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO have asked a federal judge to rule that Anthropic infringed their copyrights — and to reject the AI company’s fair use defense.
The motion for partial summary judgment, filed on Monday (March 23) in the Northern District of California, is the latest step in a case first brought in October 2023 over the alleged infringement of 499 copyrighted musical works.
It argues that Anthropic’s own admissions and evidence gathered during the case leave no material facts in dispute on key issues, and is accompanied by a 47-page statement setting out 218 “undisputed facts” supported by deposition testimony, internal Anthropic documents, and the company’s own admissions.
In a statement provided to MBW, the publishers said: “Anthropic has committed copyright infringement on a massive scale. It has never even denied copying songwriters’ lyrics.
“Having established that Anthropic copied and ingested songwriters’ lyrics without permission or compensation, trained its Chatbot (Claude) to serve up those lyrics on demand, and spit out AI-generated derivatives that compete directly with human songwriters, the plaintiffs move for summary judgement. The evidence in this case is overwhelming.”
(This case is separate from the publishers’ second, larger lawsuit against Anthropic filed in January 2026, which covers more than 20,000 songs and seeks over $3 billion in statutory damages.)
The publishers are asking the court to rule in their favor on core elements of the case without a full trial — a step that is only granted when the underlying facts are not meaningfully contested.
The motion, obtained by MBW, and which you can read in full here, addresses both the publishers’ direct infringement claims and Anthropic’s fair use defense.
On fair use, the publishers argue that Anthropic’s use was purely commercial — noting the company is a “for-profit technology company valued at $380 billion or more” with a revenue run rate approaching $14 billion — that it copied lyrics in full, and that its output directly competes with licensed lyrics services such as LyricFind and Musixmatch.
They also argue that Anthropic “cannot link its use of Publishers’ lyrics as training input, specifically, with Claude’s generation of any purportedly transformative outputs.”
The filing claims that Anthropic has itself disclaimed the need to include lyrics in its training data, citing Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan’s sworn declaration that Anthropic has “no interest” in the publishers’ works specifically, and that similar types of works “are considered fungible for purposes of the model.”
On broader market harm, the filing states that when Claude outputs lyrics in response to user requests, “Anthropic provides the same service to its users as Publishers’ licensees, without Publishers’ authorization or any restrictions on that use.” It cites data showing AI-generated songs are increasingly flooding streaming platforms, with a Deezer study estimating over 60,000 AI-generated tracks were being submitted to the platform daily by January 2026, accounting for 3% of total streams.
On the infringement side, the filing states that Anthropic admits “at least one Claude model was trained on a dataset containing the lyrics to at least one hundred (100) of Publishers’ Works.” It adds that Anthropic “does not deny that the lyrics to Publishers’ Works are included in Claude’s training data” and “has never sought nor obtained a license from Publishers to use the Works.”
“Having established that Anthropic copied and ingested songwriters’ lyrics without permission or compensation, trained its Chatbot (Claude) to serve up those lyrics on demand, and spit out AI-generated derivatives that compete directly with human songwriters, the plaintiffs move for summary judgement. The evidence in this case is overwhelming.”
UMPG, Concord and ABKCO
The publishers say Anthropic assembled this material by scraping lyrics from the internet and third-party datasets including Common Crawl and The Pile, both of which are acknowledged to contain unauthorized copies of copyrighted lyrics. The filing states that Anthropic “uses automated tools, such as web crawlers, to ‘scrape’ (i.e., copy and download) text from the internet onto its servers on a large scale.”
On the output side, the publishers cite Anthropic’s own records showing Claude reproduced lyrics to users in response to a wide range of prompts — not just direct lyrics requests, but also translation queries, chord requests, SEO article generation, homework assistance, and requests to write new songs on given topics. In many cases, the filing claims, “Claude output Publishers’ lyrics even when users did not actually ask for those lyrics or when users requested ‘new’ content.”
The publishers also point to Anthropic’s publicly available finetuning dataset on Hugging Face, which they say contains prompts requesting lyrics to works in the lawsuit. They allege that Anthropic’s human reviewers “chose” model output that accurately reproduced copyrighted lyrics while “rejecting” responses with inaccurate lyrics.
Internal Anthropic communications feature prominently. An August 2023 internal memo is cited as stating that AI models like Claude “memorize A LOT, like a LOT.” Co-founder Benjamin Mann reportedly testified that certain content is “worth memorizing.” CEO Dario Amodei is quoted as stating in an April 2024 interview that AI models should not be “verbatim outputting copyrighted content,” while also testifying in his deposition that doing so is “against the law.”
The filing also notes that Anthropic’s post-litigation guardrails “have not prevented all outputs that reproduce Publishers’ lyrics,” citing multiple examples of Claude continuing to output copyrighted lyrics to works including American Girl, Dog Days Are Over, and White Christmas after the lawsuit was filed.
Separately, just last week, BMG Rights Management filed its own copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging that the AI firm unlawfully copied and used its compositions, including lyrics, to train its large language models.Music Business Worldwide
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