U.S. District Court, M.D. Tennessee (transferred to N.D. California) · Docket 3:23-cv-01092 (M.D. Tenn.); 5:24-cv-03811 (N.D. Cal.)

Active Litigation

Court: U.S. District Court, M.D. Tennessee (transferred to N.D. California)
Docket: 3:23-cv-01092 (M.D. Tenn.); 5:24-cv-03811 (N.D. Cal.)
Filed: October 18, 2023
Category: Copyright
Judge: Hon. Eumi K. Lee (N.D. Cal.)
Plaintiffs: Concord Music Group; Universal Music Publishing Group; ABKCO and other music publishers
Defendants: Anthropic PBC
Current status: Active; discovery ongoing after 2025 guardrails agreement on lyric outputs
Docket and filings: View on CourtListener

Latest development · June 1, 2026

Case continues in N.D. California in parallel with the January 2026 second publisher suit.

Executive summary

Music publishers allege Claude was trained on and can reproduce copyrighted song lyrics without license. The first major lyrics-training case; an early preliminary injunction fight ended with agreed guardrails on outputs.

Why it matters

Defines whether lyric reproduction by a text model is infringement and what output-filtering obligations look like in practice.

Models, datasets, and materials at issue

Target models

Claude

Disputed datasets

Web-scraped lyrics corpora (alleged)

Materials at issue

Song lyrics (500+ compositions)

Facts on this page were last verified against the docket on July 30, 2026. See how we track these cases, or return to all tracked cases.

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Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC