BMG sues Anthropic
BMG Rights Management filed suit alleging Anthropic trained its Claude chatbot on copyrighted lyrics from artists including Bruno Mars and the Rolling Stones — a move that escalates legal fights over AI training data. The lawsuit ramps up pressure on model-makers and intensifies debates about compensation, licenses, and what constitutes fair use for lyrical corpora. ( )
BMG’s complaint runs 47 pages and was filed on March 17, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California as case no. 5:26‑cv‑02334. (dockets.justia.com) The filing identifies 493 musical compositions that BMG says were copied and reproduced in Anthropic’s training corpus and cites specific song titles as examples. (musicbusinessworldwide.com) Plaintiff counsel on the docket is Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, with Robert A. Jacobs listed as a filing attorney, and the complaint was submitted with Exhibit A and Exhibit B attachments. (musicbusinessworldwide.com) BMG alleges Anthropic obtained text by automated web‑scraping and by torrenting from pirate libraries, then “cleaned” the data to remove copyright identifying information (CMI) before using it to train Claude. (musicbusinessworldwide.com) The complaint seeks remedies under the Copyright Act, where statutory damages can reach up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work if a court so finds. (wsau.com) The suit arrives after Anthropic reached a proposed $1.5 billion settlement with authors over use of pirated books in training, a deal that received preliminary judicial approval in 2025. (bloomberg.com)
