Anthropic and its chief executive Dario Amodei have asked a federal court to throw out parts of the larger of two copyright suits that music publishers are pursuing against the AI company. The motions were filed on 3 August in the Northern District of California and are due to be heard by Judge Eumi K. Lee in San Jose on 4 November.
The case, called Concord II in the filings, was brought in January 2026 by Concord Music Group, Universal Music Publishing Group and ABKCO. In its current amended form it covers about 21,000 songs and seeks more than $3 billion, alleging that Anthropic obtained lyrics by torrenting them from pirate libraries. According to the publishers, they sued after Anthropic's alleged book torrenting came to light in a separate authors' case.
Anthropic's motion targets two claims. One is that Claude reproduces the publishers' lyrics when users ask for them: the company says that after years and several amended complaints the publishers have yet to point to a single infringing output, and it wants that claim dismissed with prejudice. The other is a DMCA claim that it stripped copyright management information from lyrics during training; Anthropic argues the law only covers removal from a complete work, meaning the full compositions, which it says it is not alleged to have had. The publishers maintain that Claude has produced, and still produces, their lyrics. In support, Anthropic leans on rulings from other AI copyright cases, among them Tremblay v. OpenAI, Andersen v. Stability AI and Kadrey v. Meta.
Amodei, sued personally along with co-founder Benjamin Mann, filed separately against the one count accusing him of direct infringement by torrenting. His lawyers say the complaint describes copying by other defendants but none by him, and that at most it supports contributory infringement, a claim he is not asking the court to drop. Anthropic is still fighting the central claims over torrenting lyrics and copying works to train Claude, though it has not sought to have those thrown out.
The earlier case, Concord I, dates from October 2023 and concerns 499 works. There, Anthropic agreed in January 2025 to keep guardrails stopping Claude from reproducing lyrics; the judge refused a preliminary injunction that March, allowed key claims to go forward in October 2025, and in March 2026 the publishers asked for partial summary judgment rejecting Anthropic's fair use defence of training.
BMG filed a third music suit against Anthropic in March 2026 over 493 compositions, and Anthropic settled with book authors for $1.5 billion in 2025. On the recordings side, where the RIAA sued Suno and Udio for the major labels in June 2024, Universal and Warner have settled with Udio and licensed it, Warner has also settled with Suno, and Sony is still suing both. All of these cases hinge on whether training AI on copyrighted material is fair use, which US courts have not yet settled.
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