BMG has sued Anthropic for copyright infringement, joining the ranks of other large music rightsholders that have entered the AI litigation fray.
The various publishing arms of BMG filed a lawsuit on Tuesday (March 17) against the behemoth company, which is behind the popular AI chatbot Claude. BMG alleges the model was trained on lyrics from unlicensed songs, including Billboard Hot 100 chart-toppers like Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” and now spits out infringing lyrics when prompted.
“Anthropic has blatantly violated the copyright laws and caused direct harm to BMG and the songwriters it proudly represents,” reads the lawsuit, filed on BMG’s behalf by powerhouse entertainment law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips. “Generations of inventors have brought revolutionary new products to market while complying with copyright law. Anthropic’s rapid development of its new technology is no excuse for its egregious law-breaking.”
The lawsuit closely resembles separate copyright litigation already brought against Anthropic by Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), Concord Music and ABKCO Music. It’s not clear why BMG opted to bring its own case rather than join the other publishers, who’ve been fighting Anthropic in court since 2023. Notably, Billboard recently reported that BMG and Concord are in talks to merge.
BMG says in Tuesday’s complaint that it sent a cease-and-desist letter to Anthropic in December, but that the AI company never responded. A BMG spokesperson told Billboard on Wednesday (March 18) that Anthropic’s conduct “stands in direct opposition to the standards required of any responsible participant in the AI community.”
“Protecting the rights of those who entrust their life’s work to BMG is essential. Building an industry on the backs of our songwriters, recording artists, and producers, without permission or compensation, is never acceptable,” said the BMG spokesperson. “We believe that, with appropriate permissions, generative AI can serve as a tool to enhance creativity rather than replace it, and that different segments of the music industry may benefit from it in different ways. However, copyright protection and fair remuneration are non-negotiable.”
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Anthropic did not immediately return a request for comment on the lawsuit.
Just like other music publishers’ existing Anthropic litigation, the BMG complaint alleges that Claude infringes its song lyrics in both the training process (inputs) and chatbot responses (outputs). This differentiates the publisher cases from separate copyright lawsuits brought by the major record labels against AI music generators Suno and Udio, which are focused only on unlicensed training.
On the input side, BMG claims Anthropic has infringed its intellectual property by including copyrighted lyrics in Claude’s “enormous” training set. According to the lawsuit, the training materials include text scraped from the BMG-licensed lyric libraries MusicMatch and LyricFind and sheet music books that include the work of major artists like The Rolling Stones and Justin Bieber.
BMG alleges Anthropic obtained much of this training material by torrenting files from illegal pirate libraries. This is key because a judge ruled in a different case this summer that Anthropic should be held liable for storing torrented books, leading the company to ink a $1.5 billion settlement with authors. Other AI copyright plaintiffs, including both music publishers and record labels, have since viewed this as an opening and added new piracy claims to their lawsuits.
Then there’s the question of outputs, with BMG claiming Anthropic is separately infringing its copyrights in the text that Claude spits out. According to the lawsuit, when requested by user prompts, Claude has provided all or significant portions of the lyrics to multiple BMG-owned compositions, including “Uptown Funk,” Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” and 3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite.”
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“Even when prompted for ‘new’ or ‘original’ song lyrics, Claude generates outputs incorporating unauthorized copies of and/or derivative works based on BMG’s copyrighted lyrics that Anthropic copied into training sets,” reads the lawsuit. “Such unauthorized copies and/or derivative works result from, among other things, Claude combining various songs into a single song as a mash-up in response to user prompts requesting such a combination or new songs.”
BMG is now seeking financial damages from Anthropic, arguing that the company has amassed “a fortune built on stolen copyrighted works.” The lawsuit, which notes that Anthropic recently raised an additional $30 billion at a valuation of $380 billion, seeks the statutory maximum of $150,000 per act of infringement. A non-exhaustive list attached to BMG’s lawsuit includes 467 allegedly infringed songs, meaning the total requested damages would come out to at least $70 million.
Anthropic, like the other AI companies facing a flood of copyright litigation in recent years, has maintained that it is shielded by the principle of “fair use” — a tenet of copyright law that allows unlicensed work to be used in “transformative” fashion. Whether AI training is in fact fair use is an unresolved legal question that’s currently being litigated in dozens of courtrooms across the country.
