Anthropic hit with music suit
Music publisher BMG filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic alleging Claude used copyrighted lyrics in training and outputs — one of the latest cases bringing generative‑AI training legality into court. The suit highlights rising legal risk for builders of generative systems and the need for provenance and licensing in model pipelines. (medianama.com)
Complaint was filed March 17, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California as BMG Rights Management (US) LLC v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26‑cv‑02334, and the case was assigned to Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse. (courtlistener.com) The 47‑page complaint lists 493 musical compositions BMG says were implicated and names specific works including “What a Wonderful World,” “Uptown Funk,” “Kryptonite,” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” (musicbusinessworldwide.com) Plaintiff alleges Anthropic acquired protected material via automated web‑scraping and by torrenting from so‑called “shadow” libraries, then processed those texts with extractor tools that removed copyright‑identifying metadata. (musicbusinessworldwide.com) BMG’s pleading sets out five causes of action: direct infringement through training and model outputs, direct infringement via torrenting, contributory infringement, vicarious infringement, and removal or alteration of copyright management information (CMI). (musicbusinessworldwide.com) The complaint seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willful infringement and injunctive relief; applying the $150,000 cap to the 493 works named yields potential statutory exposure of roughly $73.95 million. ( ) BMG’s filing alleges Anthropic ignored a December 2025 cease‑and‑desist demand, and the complaint arrives after Anthropic agreed in 2025 to a roughly $1.5 billion settlement resolving a separate class action by authors over pirated books used for model training. ( ) BMG notes in the filing that it controls rights to nearly four million musical compositions and frames the case as seeking both damages and “industry‑wide” corrective measures through injunctive relief. (musicbusinessworldwide.com)
