Anthropic urges judge to throw out music publisher copyright lawsuit

Anthropic urged a United States District Judge in San Jose, California, on October 21 to rule that using millions of song lyrics to train its chatbot Claude is protected as fair use under United States copyright law. The Straits Times reported that the AI company is seeking to scuttle a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Universal Music Group and other music publishers. [1][3]

United States District Judge Eumi Lee did not issue a ruling during the hearing. According to The Straits Times, Judge Lee pressed both sides on the fair use defense, which could impact dozens of copyright cases involving artificial intelligence technology. [1]

The Straits Times reported that Judge Lee questioned the assertion from music publishers that the ability of Claude to compose lyrics threatens the commercial market for their lyrics. Sonal Mehta of the law firm WilmerHale argued the case on behalf of Anthropic. [1]

Anthropic uses a method called Constitutional AI to train its Claude models through artificial intelligence feedback rather than relying only on human preference data. Amazon started as an online book marketplace in 1994 before expanding into artificial intelligence and online retail. [2][3]