Several music companies, including Universal Music Group, have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic, an AI startup backed by Amazon. The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic used copyrighted song lyrics to train its Claude 2 chatbot without permission from the music companies.

The lawsuit was filed in Tennessee federal court on October 18, 2023. The plaintiffs claim that Anthropic “unlawfully copies and disseminates vast amounts of copyrighted works — including the lyrics to myriad musical compositions owned or controlled by Publishers.”

The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic “scrapes and ingests massive amounts of text from the internet and potentially other sources, and then using that vast corpus to train its AI models and generate output based on this copied text.” They claim that this process violates their copyrights, as they have not licensed Anthropic to use their lyrics.

The plaintiffs are seeking damages and a court order requiring Anthropic to stop using their lyrics. They are also asking the court to order Anthropic to destroy all copies of their lyrics that it has made.

Anthropic has not yet commented on the lawsuit.

The lawsuit against Anthropic is one of several similar lawsuits that have been filed against AI companies in recent months. As AI technology becomes more sophisticated, music companies are concerned that AI companies will be able to create new music and lyrics that are substantially similar to copyrighted works without permission.

The outcome of the lawsuit against Anthropic could have a significant impact on the future of AI and music. If the music companies are successful, it could make it more difficult and expensive for AI companies to train their models on copyrighted data. This could in turn slow the development of AI technology in the music industry.

However, if Anthropic is successful in defending itself, it could set a precedent for other AI companies to use copyrighted data without permission. This could lead to a new era of innovation in the music industry, where AI is used to create new and exciting forms of music.