A lawsuit representing music publishers including Universal Music has accused artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic of misusing an “innumerable” amount of copyrighted song lyrics to train its chatbot.

Anthropic allegedly used the lyrics from at least 500 songs to train its chatbot Claude, with the lawsuit specifically citing songs such as the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ and Beyonce’s ‘Halo’.

The suit alleges that the bot violates the publishers’ rights, with attorney for the case Matt Oppenheim stating that it is "well-established by copyright law that an entity cannot reproduce, distribute, and display someone else's copyrighted works to build its own business unless it secures permission from rightsholders."

While there have been lawsuits levied over the use of novels, scripts and artwork to train AI, this is the first case over the use of song lyrics and AI and the first against Google and Amazon-backed Anthropic.

The suit goes on to say that Claude can illegally reproduce song lyrics on demand and that it provides responses to "a whole range of prompts that do not seek Publishers' lyrics," such as fulfilling "requests to write a song about a certain topic, provide chord progressions for a given musical composition, or write poetry or short fiction in the style of a certain artist or songwriter."

The plaintiffs are seeking money damages, and an order to stop the alleged infringement.

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