Decide Eumi Okay. Lee of the U.S. District Court docket for the Northern District of California on November 4, 2026 dismissed the direct copyright infringement declare towards Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, with depart to amend, in keeping with the court docket’s November 4, 2026 minute entry.
The minute entry left Anthropic’s separate partial movement unresolved. Lee ordered the events to fulfill and confer on whether or not to handle that movement by extra briefing or by amending the criticism and to file a joint standing report by November 11, 2026. The case, Harmony Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, names Anthropic, Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants.
Direct Versus Contributory Infringement
Amodei’s August 3, 2026 movement focused solely the declare that he immediately infringed copyrights by torrenting, not the separate contributory-infringement declare. He argued that the criticism attributes the downloads to Mann and different Anthropic workers, whereas allegations that Amodei directed, accredited, knew of or inspired that conduct describe contributory legal responsibility relatively than illegal copying by him personally.
Beneath that argument, direct infringement requires illegal copying by the defendant, whereas contributory infringement addresses knowingly inducing, inflicting or materially contributing to a different particular person’s infringement. Torrenting entails breaking information into items and redistributing these items amongst customers. Amodei sought dismissal with prejudice, however depart to amend as a substitute offers the publishers a possibility to revise the direct-infringement allegation. His movement didn’t put the contributory concept at concern.
Anthropic’s Problem to Output and CMI Claims
Anthropic’s August 3, 2026 movement sought dismissal of the portion of the direct-infringement declare based mostly on Claude’s outputs and your entire Digital Millennium Copyright Act declare regarding copyright-management data, or CMI. CMI consists of figuring out data conveyed with a piece, comparable to its title, songwriter and copyright proprietor. Anthropic didn’t transfer to dismiss the separate direct-infringement declare based mostly on torrenting or the portion of the training-and-output declare involved with coaching, though it contests these claims’ deserves.
Anthropic argued that the criticism provides no particular instance of an infringing Claude output and doesn’t distinguish which works had been allegedly copied in coaching from these allegedly reproduced in outputs. It additionally argued that the CMI declare fails as a result of the allegations concern lyrics relatively than full copyrighted musical compositions, and requested dismissal with prejudice. The dispute subsequently considerations whether or not the publishers pleaded their output and CMI theories with sufficient specificity, not whether or not any explicit Claude response has been confirmed to repeat a track.
The Publishers’ Response and the Subsequent Step
The second amended criticism filed Could 21, 2026 identifies 20,517 compositions and alleges that Anthropic copied the publishers’ lyrics with out permission for coaching, generated verbatim and near-verbatim copies in Claude outputs, and used guardrails that lined solely a restricted set of songs and didn’t comprehensively stop copying from the broader catalog at concern. The publishers’ concept hyperlinks these phases: the preliminary copying allegedly encoded the lyrics in Claude, and additional coaching and fine-tuning allegedly produced copies in response to person requests.
In their August 31, 2026 opposition, the publishers argued that they needn’t establish particular infringing-output examples on the pleading stage and that data of third-party customers’ prompts and Claude’s corresponding outputs are in Anthropic’s possession and management. They requested the court docket to disclaim Anthropic’s movement in full or, alternatively, allow one other modification.
On CMI, the publishers argued that scanning and torrenting songbooks and sheet music copied full musical compositions and that extraction algorithms eliminated figuring out data throughout coaching. That response addresses Anthropic’s distinction between lyrics and full works, which is central to the unresolved a part of the corporate’s movement.
The sensible impact is narrower than a ruling on Claude itself. The publishers can try and restore the direct-copying allegation towards Amodei, whereas his movement didn’t problem their contributory concept. The separate dispute over Claude’s outputs and possession data stays open, with modification and additional briefing now the 2 paths underneath dialogue.