The music publishers suing Anthropic want early access to evidence about the company's print-book scanning effort, internally called Project Panama, arguing that the books it bought, scanned and discarded included songbooks and sheet music holding their works. Both sides filed short position statements in a California federal court on September 11, at Judge Eumi K. Lee's request.
The fight is over timing. In the second Concord case, filed in January 2026 over more than 20,000 songs and seeking upwards of $3 billion, the judge split discovery in two: first the claim that Anthropic downloaded pirated books, then the training and output claims, which wait on a summary judgment ruling in the original 2023 case over 499 works. The publishers want scanning handled in the first phase; Anthropic wants it in the second.
The publishers say scanning and torrenting belong together because both involve copying whole books rather than scraping lyrics online, and they cite the Internet Archive's 2024 appeal loss over book scanning. Anthropic counters that the scanning allegations only concern training, that its fair use arguments in the first case will shape the answer, and that it already produced an index of scanned books and testimony from its data acquisition lead. It also notes the piracy claim covers 714 works against more than 20,000 in the training claim.
The scanning first came to light in the authors' case Bartz v. Anthropic, where Judge William Alsup ruled in 2025 that training on books and scanning bought copies was fair use but keeping pirated copies was not; Anthropic then settled that case for $1.5 billion. BMG, which filed its own related suit in March, has now joined the publishers' side of this dispute.
The pressure on Anthropic from music rights holders keeps widening: Round Hill filed a further case in August, and Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued later that month with their own scanning allegations. A hearing on Anthropic's and Dario Amodei's motions to dismiss parts of the second Concord case is set for November 4, and the judge had not ruled on the discovery question when the report ran.
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