Judge dismisses direct copyright claim against Anthropic CEO Amodei, with leave to amend, in Concord publishers suit

What happened

On 4 November 2026, Judge Eumi K. Lee of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the direct copyright infringement claim against Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei in Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-00880-EKL, with leave to amend, according to the court's 4 November 2026 minute entry. The case names Anthropic, Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants.

What was decided, and what was not

Amodei's 3 August 2026 motion targeted only the claim that he directly infringed copyrights through torrenting; it did not challenge the separate contributory-infringement claim against him, which is untouched. Anthropic's separate 3 August 2026 partial motion — seeking dismissal of the portion of the direct-infringement claim based on Claude's outputs and the entire Digital Millennium Copyright Act claim concerning copyright management information (CMI) — was left unresolved. Judge Lee ordered the parties to meet and confer on whether to address that motion through additional briefing or an amended complaint, and to file a joint status report by 11 November 2026.

Judge Lee also expressed skepticism about the publishers' specificity: the second amended complaint, filed 21 May 2026, identifies 20,517 compositions and alleges Anthropic copied the publishers' lyrics without permission for training, generated verbatim and near-verbatim copies in Claude outputs, and used guardrails covering only a limited set of songs. The judge questioned whether the publishers had provided enough evidence to proceed on that scale, and deferred ruling on the outputs and CMI claims.

Status and context

This is a procedural dismissal with leave to amend, not a ruling on fair use and not a final judgment: the publishers may revise the direct-infringement allegation against Amodei and try again. This is the publishers' second suit against Anthropic (filed January 2026, with more than $3 billion pleaded), distinct from the earlier 2023 Concord case whose 21 October 2026 summary-judgment hearing is already covered on this site. All underlying infringement allegations remain allegations, not findings.