A German judge has ruled that ChatGPT cannot legally be trained on song lyrics. The case was brought forward by a large German record label. Evidence presented during the trial included ChatGPT generating the full song lyrics of famous German songs, including “Atemlos durch die Nacht”.

The court ruled that this means OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, violated copyright law, and sets a precedent for many other ongoing and future cases.

It follows a ruling in the US recently, where AI company Anthropic was ordered to pay back $1.5 billion for books downloaded illegally off of the internet to train their AI models. 

Research from Stanford showed that Anthropic’s AI model could reproduce more than 95% of Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone.

Sources:
Guardian article on German case: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/11/chatgpt-violated-copyright-laws-german-court-rules

$1.5 Billion for stolen books: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settlement-authors-copyright-ai

Paper about AIs memorizing books: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

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