BMG Sues Anthropic Over AI Training on Song Lyrics

Music rights management company BMG Rights Management filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence firm Anthropic in federal court in California on Tuesday, accusing the company of infringing copyrights by using hundreds of protected song lyrics to train its Claude chatbot without authorization.

The 47-page complaint details allegations that Anthropic copied, reproduced, and distributed lyrics from approximately 493 BMG-owned or controlled musical compositions, including hits by artists such as Justin Bieber, Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande, and the Rolling Stones. BMG claims the infringements began around Anthropic's founding in 2021 and involved automated scraping of public websites, illegal online libraries, and unauthorized downloads via BitTorrent networks. According to the filing, Anthropic not only used these materials to train Claude but also processed, encoded, and fine-tuned the data, creating additional unauthorized copies in the process.

BMG further alleges that Claude's outputs demonstrate direct infringement, as the model has generated near-exact replicas or significant portions of lyrics from songs like Bruno Mars's "Uptown Funk," the Rolling Stones' "You Can't...