Music publishers suffer setback in copyright case against Anthropic

After a tentative ruling from the bench denying Anthropic's motion to dismiss, a federal judge reconsidered if music publishers had adequately stated their infringement claim.SAN JOSE, Calif. (CN) — A federal judge was concerned Wednesday about a group of music publishers’ claims of infringement against the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, saying the accusation that more than 20,000 works were copied through torrenting needed specific details.U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee tentatively ruled to deny Anthropic’s motion to dismiss from the bench before hearing oral argument. However, after listening to Anthropic lead counsel Sonal Mehta’s arguments, she wasn’t fully convinced that the music publishers sufficiently pleaded a claim and asked for additional briefings.“The heart of the issue is the inadequacy of the allegations,” Mehta told the court. She said the publishers’ second amended complaint did not consider that Anthropic created “enhanced guardrails” stop the large language model called Claude from infringing copyrighted lyrics in its outputs to questions posed by users.Furthermore, she said, the plaintiffs provided no details into how or why 20,517 works were chosen as examples of infringement in the suit, saying they haven’t taken their claims from “possible to plausible.”The music publishers’ attorney Nicholas Hailey said they didn’t need to prove a fact to make a claim. He insisted the publishers didn’t have access to exactly how Anthropic infringed on all the works and didn’t need to show how at a motion to dismiss.Lee was interested where Hailey’s 20,517 number came from.“It’s oddly specific, yet oddly not because of the basis,” the Joe Biden appointee said, noting she couldn’t go on “information and belief” alone.The music publishers, including Concord Music Group, Capitol CMG, Universal Music entities, ABKCO entities and other rightsholders, filed a complaint earlier this year — in conjunction with a similar 2024 case against Anthropic over Claude training on copyrighted material — after the publishers learned Anthropic used pirated materials to illegally download full copies of music composition books. The publishers say they learned of the activity from the landmark 2025 class action against Anthropic by book authors, Bartz v. Anthropic, and therefore could not bring up those claims in the 2024 filing.Mehta argued the guardrails incorporated with the newer Claude models do not include materials from the pirated libraries, and they should play an important part in showing how Claude is or isn’t continuing to output copyrighted material.Hailey countered that Claude has memorized the materials and can recall them when prompted by a user, and while it isn’t like keeping a dataset that Claude can search from, it still constitutes infringement because Claude was trained on the materials.Additionally at Wednesday’s hearing, Lee granted a motion to partially dismiss the case with leave to amend against co-defendant Dario Amodei, a co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. Lee said the publishers failed to show how Amodei committed direct infringement by approving the use of pirated materials.“Just because Amodei didn’t click download on his own computer doesn’t mean he isn’t directly liable,” argued Hailey.Again, Lee wasn’t convinced.“Every CEO for any small startup would be liable under the analysis here,” Lee said of the publishers’ arguments.Amodei may still be on the hook for secondary infringement, which Anthropic has not challenged, Hailey noted.Both the 2026 and 2024 cases are going through court proceedings with Lee presiding. The judge has not yet issued her decision for summary judgment in the 2024 case.In January 2025, Lee ordered Anthropic to maintain existing copyright guardrails for Claude’s input and output and apply them to future models, but didn’t broadly stop training on copyrighted lyrics.Anthropic has been on the legal hook for its AI since it introduced Claude in 2023. In 2025, Reddit sued the company over supposedly training Claude on its users’ data, and in Bartz v. Anthropic, the company settled for $1.5 billion. It was the largest settlement in the history of U.S. copyright cases.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads