Concord Music Group, Universal Music Publishing Group, and ABKCO Music filed a second amended complaint against Anthropic on July 22 in the Northern District of California, expanding a 2023 case covering roughly 500 songs. Running 71 pages, the filing draws on Anthropic material turned over in discovery, which publishers say shows staff and contract workers brought in for reinforcement learning were prompting Claude for lyrics themselves, making the behavior deliberate rather than accidental. Extraction tools allegedly stripped copyright notices out of lyrics before training. Investigators asking for songs including Roar and American Pie got back identical or near-identical text, and one prompt naming no song at all returned American Pie. Statutory damages sought reach $150,000 per work.
