AI firms “illegally stealing" music, new investigation reveals

A new investigation by music publishing company International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) finds that some of the world’s biggest AI firms are "illegally" using copyrighted music to train their models.

According to ICMP, they have "extensive evidence" of "serious copyright infringement" affecting “millions” of artists. Research cited including The Beatles, Beyoncé, The Weeknd, Mariah Carey, Lorde, Bruno Mars, Childish Gambino, Alicia Keys, Drake, Bob Dylan, Kanye West, and Gorillaz as examples of artists whose music has been used to train AI models “without a license”.

In findings shared with Billboard (pay-walled), ICMP has stated Google, Meta, OpenAI, Suno, Microsoft, X, and more have “scraped” music from licensed platforms such as YouTube and Spotify "without permission nor respect for laws".

It called Twitter/X's in-built AI chatbot, Grok, one of the "worst offenders", suggesting it copies and distributes lyrics of copyrighted music.

Image: ICMP shared a screenshot of the report on Billboard on Instagram 

According to enquiries led by ICMP during their investigation, OpenAI’s chatbot allegedly admitted that the OpenAI Jukebox music-making app was trained on copyright-protected music "by a wide range of artists", including Drake and Beyoncé.

ICMP compiled evidence over two years from public registries, leaked data, open-sourced AI training content, research papers, and independent studies from AI experts.

The ICMP represents 90 per cent of the world's commercially-released music, with members including Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music, and more. 

In a statement to Billboard, ICMP Director John Phelan said: "This is the largest IP theft in human history. That’s not hyperbole. We are seeing tens of millions of works being infringed daily.

“Despite their public claims that they’re not training upon copyright-protected works, we’ve caught many of them [tech companies] red-handed."

Read the full investigation on Billboard, here.

Follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Threads, Facebook, and YouTube for the latest music and events content.  

Header image credit: Blaz Erzetic / Pexels.com