Judge denies music publishers' injunction bid against Anthropic

Judge Eumi K. Lee of the US District Court for the Northern District of California denied a preliminary injunction sought by Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO, which had sued Anthropic in 2023 alleging Claude was trained on copyrighted song lyrics without permission. The publishers had asked the court to bar Anthropic from further training on at least 500 compositions by artists including Beyoncé, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys while the case proceeded.

Lee ruled the publishers had not shown irreparable harm, the standard required for a preliminary injunction. The court noted that licensing markets for AI training were already emerging — pointing to deals such as OpenAI’s content agreements with News Corp — which suggested any damage to the publishers could be compensated with money rather than requiring the company to stop training. A separate protection publishers had already won earlier in the case, requiring Claude to carry guardrails preventing it from reproducing lyrics in its outputs, remained in place.

The ruling was not a wholesale win for Anthropic. The same week, Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen ordered the company to produce a statistically representative sample of Claude prompts and outputs from September 2023 to March 2024 so the publishers could gather further evidence of lyric reproduction in actual usage.

The decision left the underlying copyright dispute unresolved, while narrowing what plaintiffs could obtain before trial and signalling that courts were treating monetary licensing, rather than injunctive relief, as the more likely remedy in AI-training disputes with an active licensing market.