Eight US music industry organisations, led by the RIAA and the National Music Publishers' Association, filed an amicus brief on March 30, 2026, asking a federal court to reject Anthropic's fair use defence in the lyrics case brought by Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord and ABKCO. The others are A2IM, SoundExchange, SONA, BMAC, the Music Artists Coalition and the Artist Rights Alliance.
The brief, filed by Pryor Cashman, supports the publishers' recent motion asking Judge Eumi K. Lee to rule before trial that training Claude on song lyrics without a licence was not fair use. A second brief, from book, news and academic publishing groups including the Association of American Publishers, the News/Media Alliance and the Authors Guild, argues much the same from outside music; its other signatories include the scientific publishers' association STM. Both were filed the same day in the Northern District of California.
The music groups concentrate on market harm, the factor courts treat as most important. They argue AI music already substitutes for human work, citing Deezer's report of over 50,000 fully AI tracks a day by late 2025 and a Deezer and Ipsos survey in which 97% of listeners could not tell AI tracks from human ones. They also argue a real market for licensing training data exists, listing deals such as Universal and Warner with Udio and Stability AI, KLAY's agreements with all three majors, Kobalt with ElevenLabs and Musixmatch's lyric licences, and note that Anthropic, valued at around $380 billion, can afford to pay.
The publishing groups' brief catalogues text licensing deals struck by OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Perplexity and calls Anthropic a holdout. It also cites 2026 research suggesting language models memorise copyrighted text. Both briefs dispute the reasoning of the earlier Bartz v. Anthropic ruling, which likened training to teaching children to write, citing another judge's view in Kadrey v. Meta that the comparison does not hold.
The original case covers 499 songs; a second publisher suit filed in January 2026 covers more than 20,000 and seeks over $3 billion, and BMG sued Anthropic separately in March. The briefs frame Anthropic's refusal to license as undermining the licensing market the music industry has been building with AI companies over the past year.
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