BMG has sued Anthropic for copyright infringement, joining the ranks of other large music rightsholders that have entered the AI litigation fray.

The various publishing arms of BMG filed a lawsuit on Tuesday (March 17) against the behemoth company, which is behind the popular AI chatbot Claude. BMG alleges the model was trained on lyrics from unlicensed songs, including Billboard Hot 100 chart-toppers like Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” and now spits out infringing lyrics when prompted.

“Anthropic has blatantly violated the copyright laws and caused direct harm to BMG and the songwriters it proudly represents,” reads the lawsuit, filed on BMG’s behalf by powerhouse entertainment law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips. “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.”

The lawsuit closely resembles separate copyright litigation already brought against Anthropic by Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), Concord Music and ABKCO Music. It’s not clear why BMG opted to bring its own case rather than join the other publishers, who’ve been fighting Anthropic in court since 2023. Notably, Billboard recently reported that BMG and Concord are in talks to merge.

BMG says in Tuesday’s complaint that it sent a cease-and-desist letter to Anthropic in December, but that the AI company never responded. A BMG spokesperson told Billboard on Wednesday (March 18) that Anthropic’s conduct “stands in direct opposition to the standards required of any responsible participant in the AI community.”

“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,” said the BMG spokesperson. “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.”

Anthropic did not immediately return a request for comment on the lawsuit.

Just like other music publishers’ existing Anthropic litigation, the BMG complaint alleges that Claude infringes its song lyrics in both the training process (inputs) and chatbot responses (outputs). This differentiates the publisher cases from separate copyright lawsuits brought by the major record labels against AI music generators Suno and Udio, which are focused only on unlicensed training.

On the input side, BMG claims Anthropic has infringed its intellectual property by including copyrighted lyrics in Claude’s “enormous” training set. According to the lawsuit, the training materials include text scraped from the BMG-licensed lyric libraries MusicMatch and LyricFind and sheet music books that include the work of major artists like The Rolling Stones and Justin Bieber.

BMG alleges Anthropic obtained much of this training material by torrenting files from illegal pirate libraries. This is key because a judge ruled in a different case this summer that Anthropic should be held liable for storing torrented books, leading the company to ink a $1.5 billion settlement with authors. Other AI copyright plaintiffs, including both music publishers and record labels, have since viewed this as an opening and added new piracy claims to their lawsuits.

Then there’s the question of outputs, with BMG claiming Anthropic is separately infringing its copyrights in the text that Claude spits out. According to the lawsuit, when requested by user prompts, Claude has provided all or significant portions of the lyrics to multiple BMG-owned compositions, including “Uptown Funk,” Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” and 3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite.”

“Even when prompted for ‘new’ or ‘original’ song lyrics, Claude generates outputs incorporating unauthorized copies of and/or derivative works based on BMG’s copyrighted lyrics that Anthropic copied into training sets,” reads the lawsuit. “Such unauthorized copies and/or derivative works result from, among other things, Claude combining various songs into a single song as a mash-up in response to user prompts requesting such a combination or new songs.”

BMG is now seeking financial damages from Anthropic, arguing that the company has amassed “a fortune built on stolen copyrighted works.” The lawsuit, which notes that Anthropic recently raised an additional $30 billion at a valuation of $380 billion, seeks the statutory maximum of $150,000 per act of infringement. A non-exhaustive list attached to BMG’s lawsuit includes 467 allegedly infringed songs, meaning the total requested damages would come out to at least $70 million.

Anthropic, like the other AI companies facing a flood of copyright litigation in recent years, has maintained that it is shielded by the principle of “fair use” — a tenet of copyright law that allows unlicensed work to be used in “transformative” fashion. Whether AI training is in fact fair use is an unresolved legal question that’s currently being litigated in dozens of courtrooms across the country.

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Music festival season is fast approaching, which means you need to start arming yourself with the proper gear to get you through.

Our pick for a product that you should have in your festival arsenal is Stanley’s new product, the Clutch Bottle, an innovative hybrid that takes form and function to heart. The bottle is equipped with a PU leather wrist strap that keeps your bottle within arm’s reach. The innovation retails for $55 and is 16oz.

If you’re looking to go hands-free, the bottle comes with a longer strap that lets you wear your hydration accessory over the shoulder or crossbody if you’re looking to switch up your look. The accompanying straps can be attached to both the top and bottom of the bottle. Just keep the bottle empty upon entry to a festival, and you should be good to carry the bottle around much like a purse with little to no effort.

The bottle itself is standard Stanley fare, made of insulating stainless steel. The bottle is not round, but rather a hexagonal shape that is easier to stow in bags or cupholders. The area you drink from is covered up with a clear tethered twist-off cap that is leakproof, great for folks prone to spilling, like myself. Obviously, we’re big fans of the pink rose quartz gloss hue; however, you’ve got more neutral tones like your standard black and cream. This bottle is dishwasher safe, which is amazing news for people who kind of hate cleaning their bottles by hand. It’s a hassle, so we don’t blame you.

If a clutch-inspired Stanley wasn’t enough, the brand also launched The Clutch Bottle Side-Kit for $45 in corresponding colors. Your bottle will go in the front bottle pouch of your side-kit, and lock down tight with the bottle securing strap to keep it from budging. The accessory also includes a zippered main pocket that can fit all your essentials like your wallet, phone, keys and even your headphones. The gear is even better for festivals since you have room for things like snacks, wristbands and sunscreen.

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This is a holder for Stanley’s new The Clutch Bottle. The fanny pack-esque model comes in three colors that correspond with the bottle colors.

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Beyond music festival applications, we can also envision this accompanying piece working great for runners or those looking for a hands-free way to carry their bottle while on a walk or a hike through the forest. The side-kit can be worn vertically or horizontally thanks to the adjustable shoulder strap and easy connection clips, giving you a range of styling options depending on your mood. It’s sort of like an elevated fanny pack that can carry a surprising amount.

Investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban joined Billboard at South by Southwest (SXSW) on Friday (March 13) to talk about why he’s previously said in interviews, and on episodes of the hit TV show Shark Tank, that music — along with other products like liquor brands and clothing lines — is “the death” for investors. The conversation, hosted by Kristin Robinson, was released on Wednesday (March 18) as the first-ever live episode of On the Record, Billboard’s music business podcast.

“Yeah, I think it’s the worst industry ever,” Cuban says with a laugh. “No, it’s probably tied with clothing, branded clothing…that’s the worst, and music is right behind it.” Later, the investor clarified that he was specifically referring to new music and the record labels that release it. To Cuban, older music, also known as catalog, is in a different category entirely — as is music tech.

During the wide-ranging conversation, Cuban talked about how music has become an “asset class,” how his company Cost Plus Drugs can help alleviate financial challenges for artists, why AI agents will create more artist independence and why he thinks the music industry has a lot to learn from sports about integrating prediction markets and betting.

Watch or listen to the full episode of Billboard On the Record with Mark Cuban below or here, or read an excerpt of the conversation further down the page.

You’ve said you don’t believe music is a great investment, but we are seeing a lot of players from the financial world, like KKR and Shamrock, now interested in buying catalogs, like Queen and Britney Spears. Why do you think that is?

To me, that’s not really music investing. It just happens to be music that is the vehicle for their investment. Licensing revenue for music is really consistent, but most artists really haven’t been able to get a big cash out yet, so someone like a KKR or another big investment company will just come in and say, “Okay, I’ll give you all this money [up front in exchange].” And they just see it as, you know, “Here’s my returns.” It’s almost like owning an apartment building for them.

Often, when I speak to investors who are weary about investing in new music tech companies, they say that the exception is that they wished they invested in Spotify. Spotify dominated the streaming era, and now you could argue we are moving into the AI era. Do you think that there’s going to be another opportunity for a Spotify-level AI music company to emerge?

It depends on how consumers take to AI-generated music, because if they see it as an equivalent to what an artist produces, then yes… We don’t know how people are going to respond to purely AI-generated music, but we’re seeing some of it roll up the [charts], so it isn’t that people are absolutely saying no, we just don’t know if they will truly say yes to it.

One thing that a lot of people in the music industry, especially investors in music catalogs, believe is that the music industry is recession-resistant. That music is not correlated to the overall market and will still thrive if the economy tanks. What do you think?

I think it holds up because the worse things are, the more people need music, you know? I’m a big believer that music soothes the soul and makes life livable. But at the same time, again, what is the source of that music? Is it AI or human? That’s what we don’t know.

Your career really took off during the dot-com bubble when you sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo. Do you think we are in an AI bubble right now?

I think for private companies, the economics may be a little bit rich right now, because, like back then, anybody with a website could go out there and raise a million dollars. Now, if you have any amount of decent AI technology, you could raise, in some cases, tens of millions of dollars, but back then, it was a public company bubble. Now, because it’s geared towards private companies, it’s not really a bubble by definition, because most people can’t participate.