Anthropic and its chief executive Dario Amodei have filed separate motions asking a US court to dismiss parts of a $3 billion copyright lawsuit brought by music publishers Concord Music Group, Universal Music Publishing Group and ABKCO. The filings, lodged on 3 August 2026 in the Northern District of California, target the larger of two lyrics-related cases the publishers have brought against the AI company, and matter because they could narrow the scope of one of the most significant copyright battles facing the generative AI industry.

Anthropic wants the court to throw out the publishers' claim that its Claude chatbot reproduces copyrighted lyrics in its responses, arguing their complaint over roughly 21,000 works fails to cite a single example of infringing output, as well as a separate claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, on the grounds it never possessed the publishers' complete musical compositions. Amodei, named individually alongside co-founder Benjamin Mann, is separately seeking to have the direct infringement claim against him personally dismissed. The case, dubbed "Concord II", was filed in January 2026 over alleged torrenting of pirated lyrics and follows an earlier, smaller 2023 suit covering 499 works, in which a judge has already required Anthropic to maintain guardrails against reproducing lyrics and allowed key claims to proceed.