Judge dismisses claim against Dario Amodei in music publishers' suit

In the music publishers’ second lawsuit against Anthropic over song lyrics, Judge Eumi Lee on 4 November granted a motion to dismiss brought by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, who is named as an individual defendant, with leave to amend. The court docket records that the ruling was made “for the reasons stated on the record”; the sources reviewed do not include the hearing transcript, so the grounds are not set out here. The case, Concord Music Group v. Anthropic, No. 5:26-cv-00880, is separate from the 2023 suit by Universal, Concord and ABKCO. On Anthropic’s own partial motion to dismiss the judge made no ruling, instead ordering the parties to confer on whether further briefing or an amended complaint was needed.

Two days later Lee issued a further order explaining the court’s concern about the publishers’ claim of direct infringement through Claude’s outputs. Anthropic had argued that the second amended complaint offered no example of an infringing output and did not say which works were infringed in outputs as opposed to training. In opposing the motion, the court noted, the publishers had argued that Anthropic “outputs ‘verbatim’ copies of those same lyrics” for all 20,517 works, which gave “the clear impression” that they had a factual basis. At the hearing, however, their counsel appeared to ask the court to infer output infringement from the works’ inclusion in training, and relied on “information and belief”.

The order says the publishers “have not alleged a single instance of any of the 20,517 works at issue in this case being reproduced as a Claude output”, nor that users had prompted Claude for any of the lyrics. It adds that it was unclear that information-and-belief pleading was permissible, since the publishers had identified specific outputs in the related earlier case and could test Claude themselves. The court said it was “concerned about Publishers’ representations” and that the briefing did not accurately present the question to be decided. These are the court’s observations on the pleadings; they are not a finding on whether Claude can reproduce the lyrics.

The order extended the deadline for a joint status report to 13 November and said the publishers need not amend until Anthropic’s motion is resolved. Anthropic also faces lyrics claims from other rights holders, in a suit by Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell and one by Elvis Presley’s rights owners.