US judge takes up Anthropic's fair use defense in music copyright dispute | MLex | Specialist news and analysis on legal risk and regulation

By Maria Dinzeo (October 22, 2026, 01:11 GMT | Insight) -- Lawyers for music publishers argued on Wednesday that Anthropic's use of song lyrics does not create something meaningfully new, whether its Claude AI tool repeats lyrics exactly, makes new works based on them, or creates new songs. The hearing focused mainly on whether copying copyrighted song lyrics to train large language models is allowed under the fair use rules of US copyright law.