Anthropic seeks dismissal in Concord Music Group's $3B lyrics lawsuit

Anthropic and its co-founder and chief executive Dario Amodei have each filed motions seeking to dismiss parts of the second copyright lawsuit brought by music publishers Concord Music Group, Universal Music Publishing Group and ABKCO. The filings landed August 3 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, targeting a case covering more than 20,000 songs.

Anthropic asked the court to dismiss the publishers' claim that its Claude chatbot reproduces their lyrics in outputs, plus a separate Digital Millennium Copyright Act claim, arguing the publishers' complaint does not point to a single example of an infringing Claude output despite alleging infringement of roughly 21,000 works. Amodei separately moved to drop the direct infringement count against him personally, arguing the complaint's claims describe only alleged copying by other defendants.

The case, called Concord II, is the second and larger of two suits the same publishers have brought against Anthropic. The first, Concord I, was filed in 2023 and covers 499 works, with a court-approved stipulation already requiring Anthropic to maintain guardrails against Claude reproducing copyrighted lyrics. Anthropic separately reached a $1.5 billion settlement in 2025 with authors over the use of pirated books in training.

Both motions are set to be heard November 4 before Judge Eumi K. Lee in San Jose. The case is one of several music-industry copyright actions against Anthropic, including a third suit BMG filed in March 2026 covering 493 compositions.

Anthropic leaned on its own words to make the case: "This lawsuit does not arrive on a blank slate," its lawyers wrote, arguing the complaint "lacks even a single example of any allegedly infringing output." Amodei's team made a similar point about the claims against him personally, writing that the complaint "asserts zero facts of any unlawful copying by Dr. Amodei himself." The publishers say they brought the second case after Anthropic's alleged torrenting of pirated books emerged through a separate lawsuit from book authors. The wider AI-music fight has moved faster elsewhere: Universal and Warner have both settled with Udio, Warner has also settled with Suno, and Sony and Universal remain in litigation against Suno.