BMG Sues Anthropic, Alleges Its $380B Valuation Was Built on 'Stolen Copyrighted Works'
BMG Rights Management has sued Anthropic in California federal court, alleging the AI company infringed hundreds of copyrights by using song lyrics from the Rolling Stones, Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande, and other artists to train its Claude chatbot. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, makes a specific argument about what Anthropic's valuation actually represents.
BMG's framing: Anthropic's $380 billion valuation — secured in a $30 billion funding round completed in February — was built on reproduced song lyrics from artists whose work was used without authorization. "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," BMG said in a statement.
The complaint cites 493 specific examples of allegedly infringed copyrights. Under U.S. copyright law, statutory damages for willful infringement can reach $150,000 per work — a math problem that produces a headline number in the tens of millions if BMG prevails on the willfulness theory. BMG is not the first music publisher to make this argument. Universal Music Group and other publishers filed a related lawsuit against Anthropic over song lyrics in 2023; that case remains ongoing. Anthropic separately settled an author class action for $1.5 billion last September.
The legal theory AI companies have leaned on is fair use — training on copyrighted material constitutes transformation. But BMG's filing targets a different axis: reproduction in output. When a user asks Claude to explain the meaning of a Rolling Stones song, the model may reproduce lyrics verbatim. That output — a direct copy of protected expression — is harder to characterize as transformative than a text summarization. Anthropic prevailed on a similar fair use argument before Judge William Alsup in a text summarization context; music lyrics are a different factual scenario.
BMG is owned by German media group Bertelsmann. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.