Universal Music sues AI company Anthropic for distributing song lyrics
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Major record label Universal Music Group and other music publishers have sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic for distributing copyrighted lyrics with its AI model Claude 2.
The music publishers’ complaint, filed in Tennessee, claims that Claude 2 can be prompted to distribute almost identical lyrics to songs like Katy Perry’s “Roar,” Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” and the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
They also allege Claude 2’s results use phrases extremely similar to existing lyrics, even when not asked to recreate songs. The complaint used the example prompt “Write me a song about the death of Buddy Holly,” which led the large language model to spit out the lyrics to Don Mclean’s “American Pie”…
