BMG Rights Management has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic, the AI giant behind the Claude AI chatbot.
The Bertelsmann-owned music company alleges that Anthropic unlawfully copied and used its compositions, including lyrics, to train its large language models.
The 47-page complaint, filed on Tuesday (March 17) in the Northern District of California, cites 493 allegedly infringed musical compositions, including What a Wonderful World, Kryptonite, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Uptown Funk, Sympathy for the Devil, and more.
BMG alleges that Claude has reproduced lyrics from its compositions in its outputs, and that Anthropic torrented pirated books containing its works from illegal “shadow” libraries.
The filing claims that Anthropic “has unlawfully copied, prepared derivative works based on, and distributed musical compositions owned by BMG, among vast amounts of other copyrighted works”.
It adds: “In so doing, Anthropic has blatantly violated the copyright laws and caused direct harm to BMG and the songwriters it proudly represents. 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.”
A BMG spokesperson told MBW today (Wednesday, March 18): “As detailed in our summons and complaint, Anthropic’s practice of training AI models on copyrighted works sourced from unauthorized torrent sites, among other acts, stands in direct opposition to the standards required of any responsible participant in the AI community. Anthropic is knowingly engaging in widespread and systematic infringement.
“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.
“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.”
The lawsuit, which you can read in full here, is the latest to be filed against Anthropic by a major music publisher.
A complaint was brought by Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord, and ABKCO in October 2023, and a second, significantly expanded action was filed by the same plaintiffs in January 2026, covering more than 20,000 songs with potential statutory damages exceeding $3 billion.
BMG, which notes in the filing that it controls rights to nearly four million musical compositions, brings five claims against Anthropic: direct copyright infringement through training and outputs; direct infringement via torrenting; contributory infringement; vicarious infringement; and removal or alteration of copyright management information (CMI).
The complaint alleges that Anthropic scraped copyrighted lyrics from the internet and torrented pirated books — including songbooks and sheet music — from illegal shadow libraries such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.
BMG claims Anthropic then used extraction tools to strip copyright-identifying information from those works before feeding them into Claude’s training data. According to the filing, Anthropic viewed such information as “useless junk” or “boilerplate.”
“Anthropic’s founders claimed to be starting a different kind of company, one with AI safety and research at the forefront that would mitigate AI’s risks. But in its pursuit of those goals, Anthropic ran roughshod over the rights of countless creatives and rightsholders.”
BMG legal Filing
The complaint states: “Anthropic’s founders claimed to be starting a different kind of company, one with AI safety and research at the forefront that would mitigate AI’s risks. But in its pursuit of those goals, Anthropic ran roughshod over the rights of countless creatives and rightsholders.”
It adds: “Anthropic pays nothing to BMG, its songwriters, or the significant number of other copyright owners Anthropic has illegally exploited to train Claude and create infringing outputs.”
BMG also alleges that Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei “personally discussed and authorized” the torrenting of pirated books from Library Genesis, and that Amodei opted for torrenting over properly licensing copyrighted works to avoid a “legal/practice/business slog.”
The filing states that BMG sent Anthropic a cease and desist letter in December 2025, to which the AI company “never responded.” Anthropic has not yet publicly commented on the lawsuit.
The complaint references Anthropic’s most recently disclosed valuation of $380 billion, following a $30 billion Series G funding round announced in February 2026, and cites run-rate revenue of $14 billion — a figure that, according to the filing, has grown more than tenfold annually in each of the past three years.
BMG has asked for its case to be heard by the same judge overseeing two other pending music publisher actions against Anthropic in the Northern District of California.
In October 2025, a judge denied Anthropic’s motion to dismiss the UMPG/Concord/ABKCO case.
Anthropic previously settled a separate AI training lawsuit brought by a group of authors for $1.5 billion.
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