Photo Credit: Elvis Presley by Rossano, aka Bud Care / CC by 2.0
Elvis Presley’s rightsholders have sued Anthropic with allegations of copyright infringement over 274 of his songs used to train AI models without permission.
AI company Anthropic faces yet another copyright infringement lawsuit, this time filed by the owners of Elvis Presley’s music in a case that accuses the company of using 274 of his songs to train its models without permission. The lawsuit was filed on Friday, October 23, by a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group (the entity that controls Elvis’ intellectual property, including his name, image, and likeness rights), alongside other companies with a stake in his music.
According to the filing, Anthropic infringed upon 274 songs associated with Presley, including some of his biggest hits. These include “All Shook Up,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and “A Little Less Conversation.” The lawsuit alleges that the Claude chatbot company used copyrighted songs to train its AI models without obtaining permission or paying for a license, and that these models can now generate unauthorized versions of existing songs.
The filing outlines that the Claude chatbot has continued to reproduce copyrighted material, even though Anthropic claims to have introduced safeguards to prevent its models from generating existing song lyrics or compositions. According to court documents, when Claude was asked to recreate songs “for a modern audience,” it produced material closely resembling the original Elvis tracks.
Although Anthropic has yet to speak publicly on the lawsuit, the company has maintained that training AI models on copyrighted material can and should be protected under U.S. fair use law.
The Elvis plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per song infringed, totaling approximately $41.1 million.
“The Elvis Plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before,” said Richard Busch, lead attorney for the plaintiffs.
Busch previously represented Marvin Gaye’s estate in its lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over their 2013 hit “Blurred Lines.” The case resulted in a ruling that the song had indeed infringed upon Gaye’s 1977 song, “Got to Give It Up.”
The Elvis Presley lawsuit is just the latest drop in the legal bucket for Anthropic. The AI company is facing allegations of copyright infringement from a veritable who’s who of the music industry, including Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, Sony Music Publishing, and Warner Chappell Music.
