BMG Rights Management has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic, the artificial intelligence firm behind the Claude chatbot, alleging the AI was trained using copyrighted musical compositions without authorization. The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California on Tuesday, claims Anthropic unlawfully copied lyrics from 493 songs, including works by Justin Bieber, Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande, and the Rolling Stones, to develop its large language models.
According to the complaint, Anthropic employed automated scraping tools and sourced material from illegal online pirate libraries to amass the copyrighted lyrics. BMG alleges this practice constitutes direct copyright infringement and also opens Anthropic up to secondary liability for contributory and vicarious infringement through its licensees and users of the Claude models. “Anthropic’s illegal conduct does not stop with these multiple direct infringements,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit cites specific examples of Claude reproducing substantial portions of popular songs, including Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Aim for,” and Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World,” as evidence that its models were trained on BMG-managed music. BMG asserts it has “never authorized Anthropic to use its copyrighted compositions in connection with Claude.”
This action by BMG follows similar legal challenges facing other AI companies. In 2023, Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music, and ABKCO Music filed a lawsuit against Anthropic with similar allegations, a case that remains unresolved. Anthropic previously settled a separate lawsuit brought by a group of authors who claimed their copyrighted books were used to train Claude without permission, resulting in a reported settlement of $1.5 billion.
A BMG spokesperson stated that Anthropic’s practice of sourcing copyrighted works from unauthorized torrent sites “stands in direct opposition to the standards required of any responsible participant in the AI community.” The spokesperson further characterized Anthropic as “knowingly engaging in widespread and systematic infringement.”
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staffers, has not yet responded to requests for comment regarding the BMG lawsuit. The complaint alleges that the infringement began at Anthropic’s founding and continues to the present day. The company’s valuation, currently estimated at $380 billion, is implicitly challenged by BMG’s claim that its success was “built on stolen copyrighted works.”
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