Court Orders Sealing of Anthropic’s Usage Metrics

Defendant Anthropic PBC filed an “administrative motion to consider whether its materials submitted in connection with the Parties’ joint submission regarding Anthropic’s preservation of prompt-output records” should be sealed. The unopposed motion was granted.  Concord Music Grp., Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, 2026 WL 2065922 (N.D. Cal. Jul. 16, 2026).

The court wrote: “The excerpts Anthropic seeks to seal relate to metrics including but not limited to information about the number of prompts entered by Claude users during a given time period.” It then added:

In the highly similar context of the Parties’ sealing dispute in the context of production of a prompt-output sample in Concord Music Group, Inc. et al. v. Anthropic PBC, case no. 24-cv-03811-EKL (“Concord I”), this Court previously found that “for a company whose bread-and-butter is generative artificial intelligence, the usage metrics of their most well-known AI product could give their competitors insight into their market share and thus may be competitively sensitive.” Concord Music Grp., Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 24-cv-03811-EKL (SVK), 2025 WL 1665754, at *2 (N.D. Cal. May 23, 2025).

The court then noted an exception if the information has become “stale” or an isolated metric from a limited time period.  However, that was not the case here.

Further: “certain excerpts herein include the price terms at which Anthropic stores its data on Google Cloud, information that is competitively sensitive and whose disclosure would likely cause competitive harm to Anthropic.”  Id. at *1.