Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei. Photo Credit: TechCrunch
Anthropic is looking to chip away at the second copyright suit it’s facing from major music publishers including Concord – in part by urging the court to toss a direct infringement claim centering on co-founder Dario Amodei’s alleged torrenting.
Having brushed off vicarious infringement allegations this past May, the Claude developer made the partial dismissal attempt official in a pair of recent filings. As we broke down in detail last month, alleged direct infringement and DMCA violations have taken center stage in the supersized suit, which Concord and a number of others fired off in early 2026.
With that, Concord II appears a suitable way to reference the follow-up complaint; technically, Anthropic is also still battling a years-old copyright action filed once again by plaintiffs including Concord.
Put differently, there’s quite a lot going on in the high-stakes cases, not to mention separate-but-similar courtroom confrontations. Even so, the present Concord II dismissal sub-dispute is straightforward enough.
Expressly citing findings from authors’ now-settled Bartz case, the publishers are adamant that the defendants took steps “to illegally torrent copyrighted works from multiple pirate libraries—including hundreds or more books containing Publishers’ copyrighted musical compositions.”
But the way Amodei sees things, dismissal is warranted because the publishers failed to “allege any facts showing that he himself had unlawfully copied” their works.
“The direct infringement claim against Dr. Amodei is legally deficient because the SAC (second amended complaint) only alleges that other defendants ‘downloaded via torrenting’ various ‘pirate libraries’ and other datasets which supposedly contained Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works,” Amodei’s legal team wrote.
“But as to Dr Amodei himself, the SAC’s allegations, without exception, sound only in contributory infringement,” they continued.
Next, Anthropic in a motion moved to axe “the portion of Publishers’ direct infringement claim that is based on outputs allegedly generated by Claude.”
In the AI giant’s view, Concord II is decidedly light on specifics here, purportedly lacking “even a single example of any allegedly infringing output.”
“Without any examples, Publishers’ bare-bones allegations regarding Claude outputs fail to state a direct-infringement claim,” the company added for good measure.
Finally, Anthropic is also looking to do away with the entirety of the claim concerning its alleged removal of copyright management information (CMI) from the publishers’ protected works in violation of the DMCA.
(Anthropic allegedly “intentionally takes steps to affirmatively remove Copyright Management Information from the text it uses for AI training,” the second amended suit reads in part.)
In brief, the technical argument at hand maintains that “the DMCA only prohibits removal of CMI from entire copyrighted works.
“Here, that means Publishers’ musical compositions, not solely the lyrics within them,” Anthropic continued. “But Publishers never allege that Anthropic possessed those compositions, much less removed CMI from them. … These allegations confirm that Anthropic never possessed copyrighted ‘works’ from which to remove CMI.”
Though time will tell whether Anthropic scores a partial dismissal win, it seems safe to describe the case’s overall pace as plodding. Meanwhile, the publishers’ older action against the AI business is tangled in the expert-testimony weeds and has a scheduling conference teed up for early next month.