Three music publishers are asking a federal court judge to issue a preliminary injunction that would prevent artificial intelligence company Anthropic from reproducing or distributing their copyrighted song lyrics.

Universal Music, Concord Music and ABKCO Music filed a motion on Thursday asking for the court to require Anthropic to "implement effective guardrails" that would prevent the company's AI models from reproducing or distributing the copyrighted song lyrics, and to prevent the company from using these works to train future AI models.

“While we can’t comment on the substance of the litigation, our focus remains the same — to build reliable, interpretable and steerable AI systems,” Anthropic said in a statement.

The three publishers filed a suit against Anthropic on October 18, which accused the San Francisco company of "systematic and widespread" infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics.

The publishers claim Anthropic used the copyrighted lyrics to "innumerable" songs without permission as part of the "massive amounts of text" that it scrapes from the internet to train its artificial intelligence assistant, known as "Claude," to respond to human prompts.

The suit alleges Claude generates identical or nearly identical copies of those lyrics when a user asks it to provide the lyrics to songs such as "Sweet Home Alabama" or "Every Breath You Take."

The publishers allege Anthropic "profits richly" from its infringement of their repertoires of copyrighted works, achieving a valuation of US$5 billion while paying "nothing" to publishers or their songwriters.

"None of that would be possible without the vast troves of copyrighted material that Anthropic scrapes from the internet and exploits," the suit alleges.

The publishers have asked the court for monetary damages up of up to US$150,000 per infringed work, and an order to stop the alleged infringement. (Reuters)