BMG Rights Management (US) LLC v. Anthropic PBC

On 17 March 2026, BMG Rights Management (US) LLC commenced litigation in the Northern District of California (San Jose Division) against Anthropic for alleged infringement of copyrighted musical compositions through the training and deployment of its Claude LLMs. The Complaint alleges that Anthropic infringed BMG’s copyrighted musical compositions across multiple stages of Claude's development and deployment. The Complaint asserts that Anthropic assembled its training corpus through web scraping, torrenting from shadow libraries including LibGen, Books3, and PiLiMi, and a physical book-scanning programme led by a former Google executive tasked with obtaining "all the books in the world." Through these means, Anthropic allegedly obtained BMG-owned works including "What a Wonderful World," "Uptown Funk," "You Can't Always Get What You Want," "Rain on Me," and "Sympathy for the Devil," among others. During processing, Anthropic allegedly applied extraction tools, including a programme called Newspaper, to remove copyright management information (CMI) from the collected texts, treating identifying metadata as "useless junk" or "boilerplate" (citing Concord I). The encoded models were then finetuned in part by directing temporary employees to prompt Claude for song lyrics and style rewrites. Following public release, Claude reproduced BMG lyrics in response to user queries, including when prompted for "original" or "new" songs. he Complaint also addresses Anthropic's practice of obtaining pirated works via BitTorrent (a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol that, by its nature, causes users downloading content to simultaneously distribute copies to other users on the network) alleging that this automatic uploading of BMG's works constitutes a further act of infringement separate from Anthropic's use of the downloaded material for training. The Complaint further alleges that Anthropic retained pirated works in a general-purpose central library intended to be maintained indefinitely; and that guardrails introduced in response to earlier litigation (Concord I) remain incomplete and do not prevent all infringing outputs or address the underlying training infringement. BMG sent a cease and desist letter in December 2025; Anthropic did not respond.

The causes of action are: direct copyright infringement in training and output under 17 U.S.C. sections 106 and 501 (First Claim); direct copyright infringement by torrenting under 17 U.S.C. sections 106 and 501 (Second Claim); contributory infringement under 17 U.S.C. sections 106 and 501 (Third Claim); vicarious infringement under 17 U.S.C. sections 106 and 501 (Fourth Claim); and removal or alteration of copyright management information under 17 U.S.C. section 1202 (Fifth Claim).

BMG seeks injunctive relief, statutory or actual damages, destruction of all infringing copies, an accounting of Anthropic's training data and methods, and attorneys' fees.