Anthropic Lawsuits

Plaintiffs. Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, on behalf of a class of book authors whose works were ingested.

Theory of liability. The complaint alleges Anthropic copied millions of copyrighted books from sources including pirate repositories like LibGen ("Library Genesis") to train Claude, infringing the authors' exclusive reproduction right under the Copyright Act. Anthropic raised fair use as its primary defense.

The Alsup summary-judgment ruling (June 23, 2025). Judge William Alsup split the question into two: training and acquisition. He held that training a generative model on lawfully-acquired books is fair use — the use is transformative, the model does not output the underlying works, and the market harm to authors is speculative. He held that acquisition of pirated copies is not fair use — downloading from a pirate library to build a permanent in-house corpus is straightforward infringement, regardless of what the corpus is later used for. The ruling set the case up for a piracy-damages trial covering more than seven million books Anthropic had acquired through pirated sources.

Settlement (August 2025). Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion — the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history — structured as four installments at roughly $3,000 per eligible work, paid into the settlement fund on October 2, 2025; April 30, 2026; September 25, 2026; and September 25, 2027. Approximately 482,460 books were identified as in-scope. The claim deadline was March 30, 2026, and at the deadline 440,490 of 482,460 eligible works (91.3%) had been claimed by roughly 120,000 authors and rightsholders. The settlement-administration vehicle at anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com publishes the claim mechanics, key dates, and FAQ.

Final approval granted (July 20, 2026). Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín heard the fairness motions on May 14, 2026 and issued the order two months later, on July 20, 2026 (Dkt. 680). The order grants final approval of the settlement, enters final judgment, dismisses the action with prejudice, and directs the clerk to close the file; the court retained jurisdiction over settlement implementation. The court recorded a claims rate of at least 91.3% of works against only 350 valid opt-outs spanning 1,802 works, and 54 objections or comments from class members. Late opt-outs were disallowed except two allowed for excusable neglect.

Fees, expenses, and service awards. The court granted the fee motion only in part. Class counsel had asked for $187.5 million — 12.5% of the fund, which the court calculated as a 6.92 multiplier on a roughly $27.1 million lodestar and "far outside" the range reasonable in mega-fund cases in the Ninth Circuit. The court instead applied a 3.75 multiplier for a fee of $101,561,111, about 6.8% of the fund, and withheld 10% of that pending a post-distribution accounting. It awarded $2,635,197.46 in expenses plus an $18.22 million cost reserve that cannot be drawn without further court approval, and cut the requested $50,000 service awards to $15,000 for each of the three class representatives ($45,000 total).

Why it matters. The Alsup fair-use ruling on training is the most-cited piece of LLM-copyright law to date. It established a federal-trial-court line that training on properly-acquired works is fair use while sourcing through piracy is not — a distinction every other AI-copyright defendant now reads for guidance, and one the music publishers re-used as the theory of their January 2026 piracy complaint (see Concord II). The settlement's board-level and governance milestones are tracked on the Anthropic Leadership page.

What to watch next. Under the settlement agreement, payments begin one business day after the Effective Date, which is the date the time to appeal the final judgment expires — so the appeal window is the gating item on distribution. As of July 31, 2026 no notice of appeal appears on the docket; the last entry is the July 21, 2026 clerk's report of the copyright determination. The remaining settlement installments fall due September 25, 2026 and September 25, 2027. Separately, rightsholders who excluded themselves are prosecuting a related group of individual actions (see the opt-out actions). The Alsup ruling itself continues to be cited in active dockets including Concord Music Group, the Concord-publisher piracy complaint, NYT v. OpenAI, and the Authors Guild v. OpenAI consolidated litigation.

Plaintiffs. Book authors, literary agencies, and publishers who owned works on the Bartz Works List and opted out of the class rather than take the per-work settlement payment. The lead case was filed December 22, 2025 and is still indexed on PACER and CourtListener under its original short title, Carreyrou v. Anthropic PBC; the court's own recent orders caption it Cambronne Inc., et al. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:25-cv-10897-PCP. Named plaintiffs across the group include Dave Eggers, Angie Cruz, Carolina De Robertis, Vendela Vida, R.O. Kwon, Brian Merchant, and Scott Carney, alongside publishers Cognella and Chicken Soup for the Soul. Counsel is Stris & Maher LLP with Freedman Normand Friedland LLP.

Theory of liability. The same acquisition theory the Alsup ruling validated, brought outside the class: that Anthropic downloaded the plaintiffs' books from shadow libraries and pirated datasets to build its training corpus, reproduced and distributed them, and stripped copyright management information in the process. Because these plaintiffs excluded themselves, the Bartz release does not bind them and they can seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work rather than the settlement's roughly $3,000 per work.

The related group. On June 30, 2026 Judge P. Casey Pitts ordered four later-filed cases related to the first-filed lead case: Cognella, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC (3:26-cv-04056), Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC v. Anthropic PBC (4:26-cv-04218), Cruz, et al. v. Anthropic PBC (3:26-cv-04482), and Kwon, et al. v. Anthropic PBC (5:26-cv-04649). A sixth, Shakespeare, et al. v. Anthropic PBC (5:26-cv-05931), was related in on July 7, 2026 after a judicial referral from Judge Lee. Shakespeare is the one case in the group that also names Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally, mirroring the choice the music publishers made in Concord II.

Why it matters. This is the tail the Bartz settlement did not resolve, and it is the first real read on whether opting out was worth it. The class release covers only the works on the Works List for members who stayed in; every excluded work is a live claim at full statutory-damages exposure. The group is also the cleanest test of how far the Alsup acquisition holding travels when it is not being negotiated against a class-wide settlement number.

What to watch next. Anthropic's motions to dismiss, set for hearing December 10, 2026 in San Jose before Judge Pitts. Plaintiffs moved on July 24, 2026 to set a single consolidated briefing schedule and hearing date across the related cases; Anthropic opposed on July 28, 2026, and that dispute is undecided. Whether the group is formally consolidated, and whether the individual-defendant counts in Shakespeare survive, are the two structural questions.

Plaintiffs. Concord Music Group, Universal Music Publishing Group, and ABKCO Music. Filed October 18, 2023 in the Middle District of Tennessee; transferred to the Northern District of California (5:24-cv-03811) where the broader AI-copyright bar is concentrated. Before Judge Eumi K. Lee.

Theory of liability. Two distinct flavors of copyright claim. First, that Anthropic ingested copyrighted song lyrics during training without licensing them (the same training-corpus theory as Bartz, but for music compositions rather than books). Second, that Claude as deployed reproduces those lyrics in response to user prompts — an output-side claim, harder to make on the books side because Claude does not typically reproduce books verbatim, but reachable for short-form lyrics. Plaintiffs sought $75 million plus an injunction.

Preliminary injunction denied (March 25, 2025). Judge Lee denied the publishers' motion for a preliminary injunction. The court held that allegations unidentified users "might" prompt Claude to produce copyrighted lyrics were insufficient to establish the third-party direct infringement that contributory and vicarious theories require, and that the requested injunction was overbroad and not necessary to prevent irreparable harm.

Motion to dismiss granted (March 26, 2025). One day later the court granted Anthropic's motion to dismiss the publishers' claims for contributory and vicarious infringement and intentional removal of copyright management information, with leave to amend. The court found plaintiffs had not pled facts showing actual third-party infringement (i.e., that real users had prompted Claude to generate the copyrighted lyrics) or that Anthropic had the requisite knowledge of any such infringement. The direct-infringement claim on the training side survived.

Secondary-infringement claims dropped for good (April 20, 2026). Rather than re-plead the contributory and vicarious counts the court had dismissed with leave to amend a year earlier, the publishers filed a notice of voluntary dismissal of Counts II and III with prejudice. Anthropic had moved for summary judgment on the same counts the same day. The withdrawal was carried into a Second Amended Complaint, which the court authorized by stipulation on May 20, 2026 and which was filed May 21 and re-filed in unsealed form July 22, 2026. What remains is the direct-infringement case on training input and lyric outputs, plus the copyright-management-information claim.

Related-case stay and new schedule (April 24, 2026). Judge Lee now has three Anthropic lyrics cases in front of her — this one, Concord II, and BMG — and on April 24, 2026 she continued all deadlines by roughly 90 days, stayed the two newer actions except as specified, and ordered the parties in all three to meet and confer on coordination, including on ownership disputes between the different plaintiff groups over overlapping compositions. She also invited a bellwether-style plan built on prioritized or representative works rather than litigating every asserted work at once.

Summary judgment and Daubert (pending). The publishers moved for partial summary judgment on March 23, 2026; Anthropic cross-moved and opposed on April 20, 2026. Six amicus briefs were granted leave on June 22, 2026 — from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group of copyright law professors, Chamber of Progress with Engine Advocacy, and the Computer & Communications Industry Association with NetChoice and A.I. Progress, among others — almost all supporting Anthropic's motion. Both sides have also moved to exclude the other's experts. Under the amended schedule the last briefs land September 8, 2026 and the hearing on the dispositive and Daubert motions is set for October 21, 2026. Pretrial-conference and trial dates were vacated and will be reset afterward. As of July 31, 2026 the motions are briefed but undecided.

Why it matters. The lyrics theory reaches the same fair-use question the Bartz ruling resolved on the training side, but the output-reproduction claim is novel: it tests whether a model that can emit verbatim copyrighted text on demand is itself an infringing instrument. And because Bartz settled before any appellate review, this is the case most likely to produce the next reasoned federal opinion on AI training and fair use — which is why the trade associations and the copyright bar showed up as amici.

What to watch next. The October 21, 2026 hearing and the ruling that follows it, which is the single most consequential pending decision on this page. Whether the court reads the Alsup distinction (training fair use, piracy not) into the music context. Whether the coordination effort across the three related cases produces a bellwether plan or a global settlement posture.

Plaintiffs and defendants. Concord Music Group, Universal Music Group, and ABKCO Music — the same plaintiff coalition as the 2023 Concord case. Filed January 28, 2026 in the Northern District of California (5:26-cv-00880). Defendants are Anthropic PBC plus, individually, CEO Dario Amodei and cofounder Benjamin Mann.

Theory of liability. The complaint applies the Bartz piracy template to music. The publishers allege that in June 2021, before Anthropic's first product launch, Mann personally used BitTorrent to download approximately five million pirated books from LibGen ("Library Genesis") and PiLiMi ("Pirate Library Mirror") — books that contained the publishers' copyrighted song lyrics, sheet music, and musical compositions — after discussing with Amodei and CSO Jared Kaplan whether to source through piracy rather than license. The complaint alleges Amodei admitted at the time that legitimate licensing channels existed but were rejected as too slow and too expensive. 714 individual works are identified in Exhibit A (including "Wild Horses," "Sweet Caroline," "Bennie and the Jets," "Eye of the Tiger"); a further 20,517 works are identified in Exhibit B. Counts include direct copyright infringement, contributory and vicarious infringement, and DMCA § 1202 violations for removal / alteration of copyright management information.

Damages. The publishers seek roughly $3 billion in statutory damages plus injunctive relief. The complaint also names specific Claude versions (Claude 4.5 Opus, 4.5 Sonnet, 4.5 Haiku) as the trained-on-pirated-works output surface.

Why it matters. This is the first major LLM piracy-acquisition case filed after the Alsup ruling and the Bartz $1.5 billion settlement. The publishers are explicitly using the line Alsup drew — train freely on lawfully-acquired works, but piracy-sourced acquisition is straightforward infringement — as the theory of the case. Naming Amodei and Mann individually is the more aggressive procedural choice; if the court allows the individual claims to survive, the personal-liability surface for AI-lab founders expands materially. The case sets up a direct test of whether the Bartz piracy theory carries over to music compositions and whether the settlement template will repeat at music-publisher scale.

Procedural posture (2026). Anthropic asked the court to stay this case indefinitely behind the original Concord action; Judge Lee denied that request on April 24, 2026, reasoning that a long stay would delay rather than expedite a global resolution and that this case asserts theories the original does not. She vacated the May 20 hearing, related the case to Concord I and BMG, and put all three on a coordinated track. The publishers then stipulated away their vicarious-infringement count (Count IV), which the court dismissed on May 20, 2026 — the same claim they were abandoning with prejudice in the original case — and filed a Second Amended Complaint on May 21, 2026.

The individual defendants are still in. Amodei and Mann appeared, retained counsel separate from Anthropic's, and have not been dismissed. Under the amended schedule the defendants' response to the Second Amended Complaint was due August 3, 2026, and on July 30, 2026 the court ordered Mann to file his answer by August 17, 2026 — an answer rather than a motion to dismiss, which means at least one of the two individual-liability claims is headed past the pleading stage.

What to watch next. The August 2026 responsive pleadings, particularly whether Amodei follows Mann into an answer or tests the individual counts on a motion. The case management conference set for September 2, 2026 before Judge Lee. Whether Anthropic pursues an early settlement on the Bartz template (the publishers explicitly framed the filing as a $3 billion claim, which is the kind of public framing that often presages a negotiated outcome).

Plaintiff. BMG Rights Management (US) LLC, suing on its own behalf and for two dozen affiliated publishing imprints. Filed March 17, 2026 in the Northern District of California, San Jose Division (5:26-cv-02334), by Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. Assigned to Judge Eumi K. Lee, who already had both Concord cases.

Theory of liability. Five claims, spanning the whole model lifecycle rather than one stage of it: direct infringement in training and output; direct infringement by torrenting (BMG alleges Anthropic both downloaded from and re-seeded to pirate libraries); contributory infringement; vicarious infringement; and removal or alteration of copyright management information under DMCA § 1202. The acquisition allegations name Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror alongside Common Crawl and The Pile. On the output side BMG alleges Claude returns substantial portions of specific hit songs on request. Exhibit A lists 467 musical compositions with their registration numbers and is pleaded as non-exhaustive; BMG seeks statutory damages up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement, or actual damages and profits at its election, plus a permanent injunction.

Procedural posture. The court related the case to Concord I and Concord II and, in the April 24, 2026 coordination order, stayed it alongside them while the parties in all three worked out how to handle overlapping compositions — Anthropic had flagged that the different publisher groups may end up disputing ownership of the same songs. Under the amended schedule Anthropic's motion to dismiss or answer is due August 17, 2026, with briefing running to October 14, 2026. A case management conference is set for September 2, 2026.

Why it matters. BMG's filing turned the music-publisher challenge from a single coalition's fight into an industry-wide one, and it is the reason Judge Lee is now managing three overlapping dockets as a group rather than one case at a time. It also folds the two theories that had been split across the Concord cases — lyrics-in-training-and-output and piracy-sourced acquisition — back into a single complaint, which makes it a cleaner vehicle for testing whether the Alsup line holds for music.

What to watch next. Whether Anthropic answers or moves to dismiss on August 17, 2026, and on what grounds. The ownership-dispute question the court raised, which could reshape all three cases' asserted-works lists. And whether the summary-judgment ruling due out of Concord I after the October 21 hearing effectively decides the shared legal questions here too.

Plaintiff. Reddit, Inc. Filed June 4, 2025 in San Francisco Superior Court (California state court) as case no. CGC-25-625892. Removed by Anthropic to the Northern District of California in July 2025 (3:25-cv-05643). Remanded back to state court March 30, 2026; the Superior Court endorsed receipt of the remand file on April 1, 2026, and the federal docket closed for good on May 29, 2026 with no notice of appeal filed.

Theory of liability. Not copyright. Reddit alleges Anthropic violated Reddit's user agreement and developer terms by continuing to scrape Reddit content after Reddit's commercial-data licensing program (which OpenAI and Google have signed onto) demanded that scrapers either pay or stop. The complaint pleads breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference, and unfair competition under California's Unfair Competition Law (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17200).

Removal and remand. Anthropic removed from state court in July 2025, arguing Reddit's claims were preempted by the federal Copyright Act and therefore federal-question jurisdiction lay. Reddit moved to remand. The federal court (Judge Trina L. Thompson, N.D. Cal.) signed a tentative remand order on March 20, 2026 and the final order on March 28, 2026, filed March 30, 2026. The court held that none of Reddit's five claims is preempted by copyright: the user-agreement obligations Reddit invokes are qualitatively different from rights granted by copyright law — in particular, Reddit's terms restrict scraping for commercial use, regulate technical-safeguard bypassing, and impose access conditions that copyright does not. Reddit's allegations that Anthropic "bypassed technical safeguards, violated contractual access restrictions, misrepresented its compliance, and exploited Reddit's platform without authorization" sit outside the copyright preemption zone.

Why the remand ruling matters. Beyond venue, the order is the first significant federal opinion holding that platform-TOS / data-licensing claims are not preempted by copyright when they're built around scraping conduct rather than the underlying content's copyright status. AI labs that hoped to fold platform-licensing exposure into the broader fair-use battle have less ground to stand on as a result. The order is being read across to other platform vs. AI-lab disputes.

Why the case matters. This is the highest-profile of the platform-data-licensing suits to date. The Bartz / Concord theories run through copyright; Reddit v. Anthropic runs through contract. If Reddit prevails on the merits, the result is a parallel track of liability that fair-use defenses do not reach — every AI lab that crawled a major social platform has terms-of-service and rate-limit-evasion exposure under the same theory. Reddit has separately signed paid-licensing deals with several other AI vendors; the litigation is leverage as much as it is a damages claim.

What to watch next. The case is now back in San Francisco Superior Court under CGC-25-625892, and the federal docket is closed. Trial was previously set for February 14, 2028 in the federal forum; whether that schedule survives the remand is unsettled. Watch for Anthropic's demurrer in state court and the substantive merits posture on the contract and UCL counts — California state courts apply § 17200 more aggressively than the federal forum did. Note that the Superior Court's case-query portal sits behind a bot challenge, so state-court entries are slower to surface publicly than the federal ones on the rest of this page; the docket numbers and dates here come from the federal remand file.