Concord Music Group, Universal Music Publishing Group and ABKCO Music have filed an amended complaint against Anthropic over the alleged copying of copyrighted song lyrics by its Claude chatbot.
The publishers filed the Second Amended Complaint on Wednesday (July 22) in the US District Court for the Northern District of California — an expanded version of the same amended complaint they first put forward in May.
It updates the case they first brought in October 2023, which covers around 500 songs and is the first of two separate copyright lawsuits the group has filed against Anthropic.
Their second, separate suit, filed in January 2026, covers more than 20,000 songs and seeks over $3 billion over Anthropic‘s alleged torrenting of lyrics from pirate “shadow” libraries.
The amended complaint also lands as Anthropic works through a separate $1.5 billion settlement it agreed in September 2025 with a group of authors over its use of pirated books to train Claude.
The 71-page pleading draws heavily on Anthropic‘s own internal records, obtained through discovery, to support the infringement claims.
It seeks to hold Anthropic responsible for what the complaint calls the “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics” through the training and operation of its Claude AI models.
The filing states that Anthropic co-founder and chief compute officer Tom Brown once queried “@Claude what are the lyrics to desolation row by Dylan?” in an internal record.
The query references the Bob Dylan composition Desolation Row, one of the works in the suit.
The complaint further alleges that Anthropic and the temporary workers it hired to “finetune” its models through reinforcement learning prompted Claude with requests for the publishers’ lyrics during development.
The publishers argue this shows Anthropic “intended, expected, and designed its AI models to respond to prompts for Publishers’ and others’ lyrics and to copy the lyrics in output – as a feature, not a bug.”
The complaint also alleges that Anthropic used extraction tools to strip copyright notices and other identifying details from lyrics during training, dismissing that information as “useless junk” in internal conversations.
It claims co-founders Ben Mann and Jared Kaplan debated which extraction tools to use in June 2021, ultimately choosing one that removed copyright notices entirely.
The filing further alleges that the term “lyric” appeared in more than 170,000 Claude prompt and output records during a nine-day window in September 2023, the month before the suit was filed.
The publishers allege that Claude reproduces their lyrics both as training input and in its output to users, and that it does so even when users do not ask for lyrics.
The complaint says that when investigators asked Claude for the words to songs including Roar, I Will Survive, American Pie and What a Wonderful World, the model returned identical or near-identical copies.
It adds that Claude also produced lyrics in response to prompts that named no song at all.
Asked to “write a song about the death of Buddy Holly,” for example, the model returned the words to American Pie.
“ANTHROPIC’S COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT IS NOT INNOVATION; IN LAYMAN’S TERMS, IT’S THEFT.”
CONCORD, UMPG AND ABKCO’S AMENDED COMPLAINT
The publishers say they recognize the potential of ethical AI, but argue that Anthropic‘s conduct crosses a line.
“By contrast, Anthropic‘s copyright infringement is not innovation,” the complaint reads. “In layman’s terms, it’s theft.”
The publishers are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work.
In January 2025, the court approved a stipulation requiring Anthropic to maintain “guardrails” meant to stop Claude from reproducing copyrighted lyrics in its outputs.
In March 2025, Judge Eumi K. Lee denied the publishers’ request for a preliminary injunction that would have barred Anthropic from training on their lyrics, finding any harm could be compensated with money damages.
The same set of orders granted the publishers discovery, requiring Anthropic to hand over a sample of Claude prompt and output records – the material now cited throughout the amended complaint.
The publishers have since narrowed the case against Anthropic to direct infringement and the alleged removal of copyright management information, dropping earlier contributory and vicarious infringement claims.
They moved for partial summary judgment in March 2026, asking the court to reject Anthropic‘s fair use defense ahead of trial.
Anthropic is contesting the case and has argued that training Claude on copyrighted material amounts to fair use.
Anthropic had not publicly responded to the amended complaint at the time of writing.
Anthropic‘s valuation has risen since the case began.
The company confidentially filed for an initial public offering in June 2026, days after a $65 billion funding round valued it at $965 billion.
That valuation lifted Anthropic above rival OpenAI for the first time.
Anthropic said its run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion in May.
The amended complaint is one of several actions the music industry has brought against Anthropic.
BMG filed a third suit in March 2026, citing 493 compositions and alleging the AI firm had built its business on unlicensed works.
Elsewhere in AI litigation, Sony Music filed a new lawsuit against AI music platform Udio on Monday (July 20).
Udio’s competitor Suno faces expanding infringement claims from Universal and Sony.Music Business Worldwide
