Owners of Elvis Presley’s music sue Anthropic for $41 million over 274 songs
AI company Anthropic is facing a $41 million lawsuit from the rights holders of Elvis Presley.
According to Billboard, the lawsuit was filed on October 23rd. It claims that Anthropic used 274 of Elvis Presley's songs to train its AI models without permission. The songs include ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ and ‘A Little Less Conversation’.
Richard Busch, the lead lawyer in the case, said, “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.”
Busch added, “The Elvis Plaintiffs are deeply protective of these iconic songs.”
According to Billboard, the lawsuit was filed by Authentic Brands Group, which owns the rights to Elvis's image and likeness, together with other companies that also own rights to his work.
According to Rolling Stone, the lawsuit claims that Claude, Anthropic's AI system, has produced copies of copyrighted songs from almost every music catalog available online, including the songs involved in this case.
The lawsuit also says that Anthropic continued to infringe copyright even after it reportedly added safety measures following an earlier lawsuit. It describes tests in which Claude was asked to recreate specific songs “for a modern audience.” According to the filing, Claude produced versions that closely matched the originals 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.”
Anthropic has not yet responded to the claims.
Just last week, a music industry group claimed that music by Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave had also been used to train AI without the artists' permission.
The claims came from the International Confederation of Music Publishers, a worldwide organization that represents major record companies and thousands of independent music publishers across all six continents.