Elvis Presley Rightsholders Sue Anthropic for Training on 274 Songs Without Permission

The people who own the rights to Elvis Presley's music have sued AI company Anthropic. They accuse the company of using Presley's music to train its AI models without permission.

Billboard first reported that Authentic Brands Group, the licensing company that controls the rights to the King's music and image, filed the lawsuit on Friday. The lawsuit claims that Anthropic, the major AI company behind Claude, violated the rights to 274 of Presley's songs.

AI companies have faced lawsuits before from record companies such as Universal and Warner Bros., as well as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). But this is one of the first major cases in which an artist's estate has taken legal action against an AI company.

"The Elvis Plaintiffs are bringing this case to protect their exclusive rights against a defendant whose entire business model is built on copyright infringement on a scale never seen before," lead lawyer Richard Busch wrote. "The Elvis Plaintiffs strongly protect these famous songs."

The lawsuit, ABE EPE LLC v. Anthropic, says the AI company trained its models using 274 of Presley's songs. These include hits such as "All Shook Up," "Can't Help Falling in Love," and "Don't Be Cruel," as well as less well-known songs. The lawsuit seeks $150,000 for each song whose rights were violated, adding up to about $41 million.

The lawsuit says that Claude has produced material that copies almost every song in every music collection available on the internet, including the songs covered by this case. It also claims that the company continued to violate copyright even after supposedly adding safety measures in response to earlier lawsuits. According to the lawsuit, when Claude was recently asked to recreate specific songs "for a modern audience," it did so and admitted: "These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges. That's edging past 'inspired by' into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out."

As Billboard notes, Busch has also worked on major copyright lawsuits, including the groundbreaking case brought by Marvin Gaye's estate against Robin Thicke and Pharrell over the song "Blurred Lines." Like that case, the new lawsuit argues that Anthropic is using Presley's songs to create new works based on them without permission through its AI models.