Anthropic and music publishers seek a ruling without trial in the song lyrics lawsuit

A federal judge in California heard Anthropic on Wednesday, October 21, in San Jose, along with the music publishers suing it over the use of protected song lyrics in Claude, its AI assistant. After several hours of argument, District Judge Eumi Lee took the matter under advisement without revealing her views.

The session pitted the two sides' motions for summary judgment against each other: each asks for the case to be decided in its favor without a trial. The lawsuit was filed in October 2023 by Concord Music Group, Capitol CMG, Universal Music, Songs of Universal, Polygram Publishing and Abkco Music. They want Anthropic to hold a license for protected works if Claude is going to use them, and they also accuse it of stripping out copyright management information to hide word-for-word copies.

Matthew Oppenheim, the publishers' lawyer, argued that Claude reproduces lyrics, at times word for word. He also sees infringement in answers that blend fragments of songs and in new songs that imitate an artist's style, since they compete with the work of human songwriters. When the judge asked whether his position would give the publishers a monopoly over lyrics, he replied that copyright "is a monopoly by nature."

Sonal Mehta, Anthropic's lawyer, contended that her client would bear secondary liability at most, because it is users who ask Claude for a lyric or for a song in an artist's style. She added that the model does not take lyrics in particular but huge amounts of text; that the songs it generates are new works; and that nothing in the record shows harm to the music industry: according to Anthropic's experts, Claude has not affected licensing or licensed lyric search services such as Genius and LyricFind.

According to Bloomberg Law, the judge devoted much of her questioning to the harm Anthropic's copying could do to the publishers, one of the four factors courts weigh to decide whether a use is "fair use," and asked both sides to help her determine whether this will be the first AI copyright case to go to trial.

Lee has already ruled in this lawsuit. In January 2025 she ordered Anthropic to keep the filters it already applied to what goes into and comes out of Claude, and to extend them to its future models, although she did not bar it from training on those lyrics. Last October she denied Anthropic's motion to dismiss the case. The company faces other legal fronts: Reddit sued it in 2025 for training Claude on its users' data, and that year it agreed to pay $1.5 billion to book authors whose works had been downloaded and stored, the largest settlement ever in a US copyright case.