Can an AI company train its system on your music without asking, or does it have to license it first? Nobody has a final answer, and almost every lawsuit and policy row about AI and music comes back to this question. The big AI music generators, and the chatbots that can recite lyrics back to you, were mostly built by hoovering up existing work without licences, on the assumption that they were allowed to.
In the United States the fight is about “fair use”, a part of US copyright law that permits some copying without permission. Two 2025 cases, both about books rather than music, ended with judges accepting that training was fair use, which AI companies have presented as the matter being closed, but that badly overstates what the rulings did. In one of them the judge said he ruled that way only because the writers had argued the point poorly, and that plenty of future claims would not be fair use at all. The US Copyright Office has separately said music is less likely than text to qualify, because training a music generator on songs does less to transform them. More than a hundred related cases are still live. The one that matters most to songwriters is a claim by a group of music publishers, among them Universal and Concord, against the AI company Anthropic, over lyrics they say were used to train its Claude model without a licence.
In Germany the courts have gone further. In late 2025 the collecting society GEMA won a case against OpenAI over ChatGPT memorising and reproducing song lyrics, and a second case, against the music generator Suno, is due to be decided within days of this being written.
There is now hard evidence of the market damage that fair use cases turn on. AI tracks make up a large and rising share of what gets uploaded to streaming services, AI songs have reached the charts, and a study by GEMA and the French society SACEM puts the likely fall in creator income at 27% by 2028. Winning in court will not, on its own, reverse that: the tools exist, they are getting better, and some are built in countries that no UK or US ruling can reach.
No court has handed AI companies a right to use your work, and the courts and regulators that have looked closely have tended to lean the other way. The claim that the argument is over reflects what the AI industry wants, not what has actually been decided.
