Judge rejects bid to block Anthropic from using song lyrics for AI training

What just happened? There has been a victory for an AI company in one of the many legal fights over copyrighted works, but the case is far from over. A California judge has rejected a preliminary bid from Universal Music Group (UMG) and other publishers to block their lyrics from being used by Anthropic to train its chatbot, Claude. UMG, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic in 2023 over claims that it used lyrics from at least 500 songs by musicians including Beyonce, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys, to train Claude without permission. The lawsuit claimed Anthropic was violating US copyright laws with its actions. The music groups said they were not asking Anthropic to retrain its existing AI models or remove any from the marketplace. The injunction would not have impacted any models under development, either – it would have just stopped the start-up from using the song lyrics. Judge Eumi K. Lee said this week that the scope of the requested injunction was too broad as the details ... Read full article.