March 25 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence company

Anthropic convinced a California federal judge on Tuesday to

reject a preliminary bid to block it from using lyrics owned by

Universal Music Group and other music publishers to

train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.

U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee said that the publishers'

request was too broad and that they failed to show Anthropic's

conduct caused them "irreparable harm."

Spokespeople for the labels did not immediately respond to

requests for comment on the decision. An Anthropic spokesperson

said the company was pleased that the court did not grant the

publishers' "disruptive and amorphous request."

Music publishers UMG, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic in

2023, alleging that it infringed their copyrights in lyrics from

at least 500 songs by musicians including Beyoncé, the Rolling

Stones and the Beach Boys.

The publishers claimed Anthropic used the lyrics without

permission to train Claude to respond to human prompts.

The lawsuit is one of several arguing that copyrighted works

by authors, news outlets, visual artists and others have been

misused without consent or payment to develop AI products.

Tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Meta

Platforms ( META ) have said that their systems make "fair use"

of copyrighted material under U.S. copyright law by studying it

to learn to create new, transformative content.

Fair use is likely to be the determinative question in the

lawsuits, though Lee's opinion did not specifically address the

issue.

Lee rejected the publishers' argument that Anthropic's use

of their lyrics caused them irreparable harm by diminishing

their licensing market.

"Publishers are essentially asking the Court to define the

contours of a licensing market for AI training where the

threshold question of fair use remains unsettled," Lee said.