<\/p>\n
Universal Music Publishing Group<\/a>, Concord Music Group<\/a>, and ABKCO have asked a federal judge to rule that Anthropic infringed their copyrights \u2014 and to reject the AI company\u2019s fair use defense.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> over the alleged infringement of 499 copyrighted musical works.<\/p>\n It argues that Anthropic\u2019s 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 \u201cundisputed facts\u201d <\/a>supported by deposition testimony, internal Anthropic documents, and the company\u2019s own admissions.<\/p>\n In a statement provided to MBW, the publishers said: \u201cAnthropic has committed copyright infringement on a massive scale. It has never even denied copying songwriters\u2019 lyrics.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving established that Anthropic copied and ingested songwriters\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n (This case is separate from the publishers\u2019 second, larger lawsuit against Anthropic filed in January 2026, which covers more than 20,000<\/strong> songs<\/a> and seeks over $3 billion in statutory damages.)<\/p>\n The publishers are asking the court to rule in their favor on core elements of the case without a full trial \u2014 a step that is only granted when the underlying facts are not meaningfully contested.<\/p>\n The motion, obtained by MBW, and which you can read in full here,<\/a>\u00a0addresses both the publishers\u2019 direct infringement claims and Anthropic\u2019s fair use defense.<\/p>\n On fair use, the publishers argue that Anthropic\u2019s use was purely commercial \u2014 noting the company is a \u201cfor-profit technology company valued at $380 billion<\/a> or more\u201d with a revenue run rate approaching $14 billion \u2014 that it copied lyrics in full, and that its output directly competes with licensed lyrics services such as LyricFind<\/a> and Musixmatch.<\/p>\n They also argue that Anthropic \u201ccannot link its use of Publishers\u2019 lyrics as training input, specifically, with Claude\u2019s generation of any purportedly transformative outputs.\u201d<\/p>\n The filing claims that Anthropic has itself disclaimed the need to include lyrics in its training data, citing Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan\u2019s sworn declaration that Anthropic has \u201cno interest\u201d in the publishers\u2019 works specifically, and that similar types of works \u201care considered fungible for purposes of the model.\u201d<\/p>\n On broader market harm, the filing states that when Claude outputs lyrics in response to user requests, \u201cAnthropic provides the same service to its users as Publishers\u2019 licensees, without Publishers\u2019 authorization or any restrictions on that use.\u201d It cites data showing AI-generated songs are increasingly flooding streaming platforms, with a Deezer<\/a> study estimating over 60,000 AI-generated tracks<\/a> were being submitted to the platform daily by January 2026, accounting for 3% of total streams.<\/p>\n On the infringement side, the filing states that Anthropic admits \u201cat least one Claude model was trained on a dataset containing the lyrics to at least one hundred (100) of Publishers\u2019 Works.\u201d It adds that Anthropic \u201cdoes not deny that the lyrics to Publishers\u2019 Works are included in Claude\u2019s training data\u201d and \u201chas never sought nor obtained a license from Publishers to use the Works.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHaving established that Anthropic copied and ingested songwriters\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n UMPG, Concord and ABKCO\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 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 \u201cuses automated tools, such as web crawlers, to \u2018scrape\u2019 (i.e., copy and download) text from the internet onto its servers on a large scale.\u201d<\/p>\n On the output side, the publishers cite Anthropic\u2019s own records showing Claude reproduced lyrics to users in response to a wide range of prompts \u2014 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, \u201cClaude output Publishers\u2019 lyrics even when users did not actually ask for those lyrics or when users requested \u2018new\u2019 content.\u201d<\/p>\n The publishers also point to Anthropic\u2019s publicly available finetuning dataset on Hugging Face, which they say contains prompts requesting lyrics to works in the lawsuit. They allege that Anthropic\u2019s human reviewers \u201cchose\u201d model output that accurately reproduced copyrighted lyrics while \u201crejecting\u201d responses with inaccurate lyrics.<\/p>\n Internal Anthropic communications feature prominently. An August 2023 internal memo is cited as stating that AI models like Claude \u201cmemorize A LOT, like a LOT.\u201d Co-founder Benjamin Mann reportedly testified that certain content is \u201cworth memorizing.\u201d CEO Dario Amodei is quoted as stating in an April 2024 interview that AI models should not be \u201cverbatim outputting copyrighted content,\u201d while also testifying in his deposition that doing so is \u201cagainst the law.\u201d<\/p>\n The filing also notes that Anthropic\u2019s post-litigation guardrails \u201chave not prevented all outputs that reproduce Publishers\u2019 lyrics,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Separately, just last week, BMG<\/a> Rights Management filed its own copyright infringement<\/a> 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<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.musicbusinessworldwide.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO have asked a federal judge to rule that Anthropic infringed their copyrights \u2014 and to reject the AI company\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2344080,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2344079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/UMG-Concord-and-ABKCO-file-new-motion-asking-judge-to.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2344079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2344079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2344079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2344081,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2344079\/revisions\/2344081"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2344080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2344079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2344079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2344079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n