AIPolicyTracker

AI incident ·

Anthropic Allegedly Copied Copyrighted Song Lyrics Without Permission to Train Claude

11 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Large Language Model Developers, Chatbot Developers and 1 other and deployed by Anthropic and Ai Service Providers allegedly harmed Universal Music Group, Songwriters and 9 others.

Risk domain
Not classified
Occurred
Coverage
11 reportsOct 2023 - Aug 2026

What happened

Music publishers alleged that Anthropic copied copyrighted song lyrics without permission to train Claude and that Claude reproduced protected lyrics in its outputs. Anthropic denied infringement and has argued that its training use is fair use. Publishers alleged that the conduct deprived rightsholders and songwriters of licensing control and revenue and undermined markets for licensed lyrics.

Laws that address this harm

No recorded instrument yet addresses this use case where it happened. See the open queue.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (11)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Universal Music Group, Songwriters, Round Hill Music, Publishers, Musicians, Music Publishers, Intellectual Property Rights Holders, Copyright Holders, Concord Music Group, Bmg Rights Management, Abkco Music

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

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Source record: incident #1657 on the AI Incident Database · all 11 reports