Jan 29, 2026•10:00pm UTC

Music industry remains split on AI

The music industry’s back-and-forth battle with AI wages on.

On Wednesday, a coalition of music publishers including Universal, Concord and ABKCO filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic, seeking more than $3 billion in damages over the infringement of more than 20,000 songs. According to a report from Music Business Worldwide, The complaint intensifies a lawsuit filed in October 2023, which covered roughly 500 songs and sought $75 million in damages.

The plaintiffs told Music Business Worldwide that the lawsuit is the result of the “persistent and brazen infringement of our songwriters’ copyrighted compositions taken from notorious pirate sites.”

Along with targeting AI companies, music platforms are now targeting the AI-generated music itself: On Thursday, Deezer made its AI music detection tool commercially available to other platforms. The tool finds, tags and removes AI-generated music from its recommendation algorithm with 99.8% accuracy, according to the release. In 2025, Deezer’s tool caught more than 13.4 million tracks created using AI.

But the music industry may be sending AI firms mixed signals. Late last year, Warner Music Group settled its lawsuits with AI platforms Suno and Udio. Universal Music Group, meanwhile, settled its own lawsuit with Udio, announcing a partnership with the startup, and forged a deal with Stability AI.

Musicians themselves are divided on where AI belongs in their creative processes. In November, hundreds of artists, including Paul McCartney, Kate Bush and Annie Lennox, came together to create a silent AI protest album titled “Is This What We Want?” Others are opting to go with it, with artists like Liza Minnelli and Art Garfunkel partnering with ElevenLabs on a project to “co-create” studio-quality music.

Our Deeper View

What this fight boils down to is control. Record labels and publishers want control of the musical outputs that these AI models are creating, as well as any potential cash that can be made as a result. This is likely why these labels are striking deals with smaller AI firms while legally going after the big ones that can’t be so easily swayed. Artists, too, want control over these outputs, especially given the hard work and dedication to the craft that goes into writing music in the first place. Creation is the core of the music industry. Without control over that creation, the potential to make a living as a creator is existentially threatened.