Anthropic and its co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei have each filed motions seeking to dismiss parts of the second copyright infringement lawsuit brought against the company by a group of music publishers.
The two filings landed on Monday (August 3) in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
They target the case that Concord Music Group, Universal Music Publishing Group and ABKCO are pursuing over more than 20,000 songs.
In its own motion, which you can read here, Anthropic asked the court to dismiss the publishers’ claim that its Claude chatbot reproduces their lyrics in its outputs, along with a separate claim brought under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Amodei, named as an individual defendant alongside co-founder Benjamin Mann, filed a separate motion (read here) asking the court to dismiss the direct copyright infringement claim against him personally.
The suit, referred to in the filings as “Concord II,” is the second and larger of two separate copyright cases the same publishers have brought against Anthropic.
They filed it in January 2026, seeking more than USD $3 billion over Anthropic’s alleged copying of lyrics via torrenting from pirate libraries.
The publishers say they brought the second case after Anthropic‘s alleged torrenting of pirated books emerged through a separate lawsuit brought by book authors.
The publishers’ earlier case, known as “Concord I,” was filed in October 2023 and covers 499 works.
In that earlier case, the court in January 2025 approved a stipulation requiring Anthropic to maintain “guardrails” intended to stop Claude from reproducing copyrighted lyrics in its outputs.
Judge Eumi K. Lee denied the publishers’ request for a preliminary injunction in March 2025, finding that any harm could be addressed through money damages.
She later allowed the publishers to press ahead with key parts of “Concord I” in October 2025, rejecting much of an earlier Anthropic motion to dismiss.
The publishers then moved for partial summary judgment in March 2026, asking the court to reject Anthropic’s argument that training Claude on copyrighted material is fair use.
Much of Anthropic‘s motion focuses on the publishers’ claim that Claude generates infringing lyrics in response to user prompts – what the filings call output-based infringement.
The company argued that the publishers’ second amended complaint, which asserts infringement of roughly 21,000 works, does not point to a single example of an infringing Claude output.
“This lawsuit does not arrive on a blank slate,” Anthropic‘s lawyers wrote, adding that the “Concord II” complaint “lacks even a single example of any allegedly infringing output.”
The publishers allege that Anthropic’s models “still generate output infringing Publishers’ works” and that Claude “has generated and continues to generate responses reproducing those lyrics,” according to the complaint.
Anthropic asked the court to dismiss the output claim “with prejudice,” arguing that the publishers had years and multiple amended complaints to produce an example and did not do so.
The company also moved to dismiss the publishers’ DMCA claim in full.
That claim accuses Anthropic of removing copyright management information (CMI) from lyrics during Claude‘s training and of distributing those lyrics without it.
Anthropic argued that the DMCA bars removing such information only from a complete copyrighted work, which here means the publishers’ full musical compositions.
Anthropic said the publishers never allege the company possessed those compositions.
Anthropic is contesting, but has not moved to dismiss, the publishers’ claims over the alleged torrenting of lyrics and the copying of works to train Claude.
In his separate filing, Amodei moved to dismiss the single direct copyright infringement count against him, which the complaint titles “Direct Copyright Infringement by Torrenting.”
Amodei‘s legal team argued that the complaint devotes nearly 200 paragraphs to alleged copying by others, but contains no facts showing that he himself copied the publishers’ works.
“The direct infringement claim against Dr. Amodei is legally deficient because the SAC [second amended complaint] only alleges that other defendants ‘downloaded via torrenting’ various ‘pirate libraries’ and other datasets which supposedly contained Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.”
Dario Amodei’s legal team
“The direct infringement claim against Dr. Amodei is legally deficient because the SAC [second amended complaint] only alleges that other defendants ‘downloaded via torrenting’ various ‘pirate libraries’ and other datasets which supposedly contained Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works,” Amodei‘s legal team wrote.
The filing argued that the allegations against Amodei “without exception, sound only in contributory infringement” – a separate claim his motion does not seek to dismiss.
“[T]he complaint asserts zero facts of any unlawful copying by Dr. Amodei himself,” Amodei‘s lawyers wrote.
Both motions are set to be heard on November 4 before Judge Lee in San Jose.
“Concord II” is one of several copyright actions the music industry has brought against Anthropic.
BMG filed a third suit against the company in March 2026, citing 493 compositions.
Anthropic separately reached a USD $1.5 billion settlement in 2025 with a group of authors who accused it of using pirated books to train Claude.
In its “Concord II” motion, the company leaned on rulings from copyright cases against other AI developers, including Tremblay v. OpenAI, Andersen v. Stability AI and Kadrey v. Meta.
The wider recorded music business has pursued its own AI fight against Suno and Udio, which the RIAA sued in June 2024 on behalf of the major labels.
Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group have both settled with Udio and signed licensing deals, and Warner Music Group has also settled with Suno – so far the only major label to do so. Sony Music remains in litigation against both Udio and Suno, while Universal Music Group is still fighting Suno.
Those cases, like the Anthropic suits, turn on whether training generative AI models on copyrighted material qualifies as fair use – a question US courts have yet to settle.Music Business Worldwide
