Music publishers refile the Anthropic lyrics case with direct infringement front and center

Major music publishers led by Concord and BMG refiled their case against Anthropic on July 22, 2026, and the shape of the fight is now clear. The contributory and vicarious claims are gone. Direct infringement and copyright management information removal are what is left, and they are the harder claims for Anthropic to shrug off.

The refiling landed in the older of two overlapping suits, the one that started back in 2024. The publishers had already stripped the secondary claims in a second amended complaint. They resubmitted it to comply with a redaction-related court order, as Digital Music News reported.

Why the publishers dropped their secondary claims

This is the same retreat playing out across the AI copyright docket. In March 2026, the Supreme Court sided with Cox Communications and narrowed secondary liability, the theory that holds one party responsible for someone else’s infringement.

After Cox, suing Anthropic for what Claude’s users might do got much harder. So the publishers walked back the vicarious and contributory claims and put their weight behind the one theory Cox left standing: that Anthropic itself copied the work.

What direct infringement and CMI removal actually claim

Direct infringement points at Anthropic’s own copying. The publishers say the company reproduced their lyrics to build the training set for Claude, on both the training and output sides.

The second charge is quieter and sharper. Copyright management information is the credit and ownership data attached to a work, the songwriter, the copyright notice, the rights holder. Stripping it out is a separate violation under US copyright law. The publishers allege Anthropic used extraction tools to remove that information from lyrics it scraped and from third-party datasets.

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Anthropic has intentionally removed and altered copyright management information in the process of training Anthropic's AI models, including by copying Publishers' lyrics from websites containing those lyrics.

One sentence in the refiled complaint stays redacted. It sits next to a paragraph alleging Anthropic knowingly used datasets like The Pile and Common Crawl that had already been “systematically stripped of copyright management information.” The newer suit adds a contributory-by-torrenting claim against co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann.

Where the Anthropic case goes next

The presiding judge set a case management conference for the afternoon of September 2, 2026. That is the next real marker, and it covers the overlapping suits together.

The training-data question is the one every AI copyright case now turns on, including Sony’s expanding suit against Udio. Anthropic, meanwhile, is still in mediation with the publishers on a parallel track.