Major music publishers Universal Music, Concord, and ABKCO are seeking a preliminary injunction against Anthropic in their ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit. The publishers aim to stop Anthropic from training its Claude AI assistant using their copyrighted works.

The lawsuit, filed in mid-October, alleges that Anthropic committed copyright infringement in multiple ways:

• Unauthorized ingestion and copying of musical compositions
• Converting protected works into "tokens" during AI training
• Generating "identical or near-identical copies" of song lyrics through Claude, often without attribution

The publishers are specifically requesting the court to:

1. Force Anthropic to implement guardrails preventing unauthorized lyric reproduction
2. Stop the company from using copyrighted lyrics to train future AI models

The plaintiffs argue that Anthropic's actions cause irreparable harm by:

• Denying copyright holders control over their works
• Failing to provide proper attribution
• Creating unauthorized derivative works
• Damaging relationships with licensed partners
• Undermining songwriter confidence in publishers' ability to protect their interests

Anthropic, which recently received billions in funding from Google, maintains that using protected content "as an intermediate step to create a non-infringing output can constitute fair use."

Despite these legal challenges, the AI music landscape continues to evolve. Universal Music is pursuing AI partnerships and new products, while YouTube recently launched "Dream Track," allowing creators to use AI-generated artist voices in Shorts. Warner Music has also announced an AI partnership with Edith Piaf's estate to recreate her voice for an animated biopic.

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