Why the Anthropic Song Lyrics Fight Now Hinges on Who Pushes the Button
Anthropic concedes verbatim lyric copies are not fair use, so its courtroom clash with music publishers now turns on whether Claude users or the company own the rest. Judge Eumi Lee heard both sides on October 21 and has not ruled.
Anthropic is not defending every Claude output. In a court filing ahead of Wednesday's hearing, the company conceded it does not assert fair use for verbatim copies of lyrics that Claude spits out. That concession moved the real fight somewhere more interesting: who is responsible when a chatbot writes a song, and whether a song that sounds like Taylor Swift counts as a copy at all.
Those questions filled several hours of argument on October 21 in San Jose, where U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee heard cross-motions for summary judgment in Concord Music Group v. Anthropic. Lee took the motions under submission without ruling, according to Courthouse News. The case is still open, and nothing about its outcome is settled.
Three kinds of output, three different fights
The publishers, led by Concord, Universal Music Publishing and Abkco, first sued in October 2023. They split Claude's output into three buckets, according to Courthouse News and their own briefs:
- Verbatim lyrics, which the publishers say Claude has reproduced for each of the 499 works in suit.
- Derivatives or mashups, where Claude's answers reference or include excerpts of protected songs.
- Synthetic songs, new lyrics written in the style or genre of an existing artist.
The first bucket is where Anthropic gave ground. The publishers' opposition brief quotes Anthropic's own motion: "Anthropic does not assert a fair use defense to any actual 'verbatim . . . cop[y] of lyrics'" in output. The publishers argue that admission alone should earn them summary judgment on that output. Their brief opens with a Bob Dylan line.
"Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king." Bob Dylan, quoted in the publishers' summary judgment brief
The synthetic bucket is where the publishers push hardest. Publishers' attorney Matt Oppenheim told the court Claude received nearly 120,000 requests to generate synthetic lyrics over six months, Reuters reported, and warned that models like Claude "could overwhelm the market with AI-generated content very easily."
"It's not curing cancer, it's to create other lyrics. It couldn't do it if it didn't have the lyrics in the database." Matt Oppenheim, attorney for the publishers
Lee pushed back. Courthouse News reported she asked whether his theory would give publishers a monopoly on lyrics, so that nobody, AI included, could write in an older song's style without a license. Oppenheim did not flinch: "Copyright is a monopoly by nature."
Anthropic's button defense
Anthropic attorney Sonal Mehta of WilmerHale argued the company faces at most secondary liability because users are the ones "pushing the button" when they ask for lyrics or a Swift soundalike, according to Courthouse News. Anthropic's reply brief leans on a 2019 Ninth Circuit decision, VHT v. Zillow, to argue that building guardrails against infringement does not make a company the direct infringer.
On training, the reply brief says Anthropic needed "essentially all the text publicly available on the internet" and that lyrics were a "tiny fraction" swept up along the way. Mehta also called synthetic songs new, copyrightable works.
"There isn't anything in the record that shows doom for the music industry." Sonal Mehta, attorney for Anthropic
Reuters reported Mehta also cited UMG's own public statement that AI is "overwhelmingly a net positive" for the music business.
Why the split matters beyond music
Bloomberg Law reported that Lee pressed both sides to help her decide whether this becomes the first AI copyright case to reach trial. Her colleagues in the Northern District of California have already split. Judge William Alsup sided with Anthropic on training with books in 2025, while Judge Vince Chhabria ruled for Meta but warned that AI training "in many circumstances" would not be fair use, Reuters noted. Anthropic later settled the authors' case for $1.5 billion, per Courthouse News.
Training is one use; outputs are another. Anthropic wants them analyzed separately, and the publishers want them judged together. Whichever framing Lee adopts will tell every AI company whether the user's prompt is a shield or just a detail. For the separate Sony Music and Warner Chappell lyrics suit, see our earlier coverage.
