Amodei wins direct copyright complaint dismissed with permission to modify – Unite.AI

Judge Eumi K. Lee of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Nov. 4, 2026 dismissed the direct copyright infringement claim against Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, with permission to amend, according to Nov. 4, 2026 court records.

The record left Anthropic’s separate partial motion unresolved. Lee ordered the parties to meet and discuss whether to address that motion through additional briefing or by amending the complaint and to submit a joint status report by Nov. 11, 2026. The case, Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBCnames Anthropic, Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants.

Direct or contributory infringement

Amodei’s August 3, 2026 motion targeted only the claim that he directly infringed copyrights through torrenting, not the separate claim of contributory infringement. He argued that the complaint attributes the downloads to Mann and other Anthropic employees, while the allegations that Amodei directed, approved, knew about or encouraged such conduct depict contributory responsibility rather than unlawful copying by him personally.

According to this argument, direct infringement requires unlawful copying by the defendant, while contributory infringement involves inducing, causing, or materially contributing to the infringement by another person. Torrenting involves breaking files into pieces and redistributing those pieces among users. Amodei asked for dismissal with prejudice, but permission to edit instead gives the publishers the opportunity to review the allegation of direct infringement. His motion did not question the contributory theory.

Anthropic’s challenge to CMI production and claims

Anthropic’s August 3, 2026 motion sought dismissal of the portion of the direct infringement complaint based on Claude’s findings and the entire Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint regarding Copyright Management Information, or CMI. CMI includes identifying information conveyed with a work, such as title, author, and copyright owner. Anthropic has not moved to dismiss the separate torrenting-based claim of direct infringement or the training portion of the training and performance request, although it disputes the merits of those claims.

Anthropic argued that the complaint provides no specific example of an infringing Claude production and does not distinguish which works were allegedly copied during the training from those allegedly reproduced in the results. He further argued that CMI’s request is dismissed because the allegations involve lyrics rather than complete copyrighted musical compositions, and sought dismissal with prejudice. The controversy therefore concerns whether the publishers have asserted their production and CMI theories with sufficient specificity, not whether a particular response by Claude has been shown to copy a song.

The publishers’ response and the next step

The second amended complaint, filed on May 21, 2026, identifies 20,517 compositions and alleges that Anthropic copied publishers’ lyrics without training permission, generated verbatim and near-verbatim copies in Claude’s outputs, and used guardrails that covered only a limited set of songs and did not comprehensively prevent copying from the larger catalog at issue. Publisher theory links these stages: the initial copy would encode the texts in Claude, and further training and fine-tuning would produce copies in response to user requests.

In their August 31, 2026 opposition, the Publishers argued that it is not necessary to identify specific examples of infringing output at the filing stage and that third-party user suggestion records and corresponding Claude output are in Anthropic’s possession and control. They asked the court to deny Anthropic’s motion in its entirety or, alternatively, to allow another amendment.

On CMI, publishers argued that scanning and torrenting of songbooks and sheet music copied complete musical compositions and that the extraction algorithms removed identifying information during training. This response addresses Anthropic’s distinction between texts and complete works, which is central to the unresolved part of the company’s movement.

The practical effect is more limited than a sentence on Claude himself. The publishers may attempt to redress the copying charge directed against Amodei, while his motion did not challenge their contributory theory. The separate dispute over Claude’s results and ownership information remains open, with changes and additional information now on the two routes under discussion.