Owners of Elvis' music sue Anthropic, claim copyright infringement

A group of companies and trusts that manage Elvis Presley's music is suing Anthropic. They claim the company trained its AI system, Claude, using music created by the famous musician without permission.

Authentic Brands filed the lawsuit against Anthropic on Friday, Oct. 23, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit focuses on AI that creates music. It claims Claude copies music that Authentic Brands licenses to others and that Anthropic is breaking copyright law by doing so.

"In simple terms, Anthropic has tested the old idea that monkeys using typewriters could eventually recreate 'Hamlet' if given enough time," Authentic Brands' lawyers wrote in the lawsuit, which The Commercial Appeal, part of the USA TODAY Network, obtained. "Instead of teaching its AI models from the ground up, Anthropic found it much easier to copy existing work, which amounts to copyright infringement."

"We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully," an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement to The Commercial Appeal on Oct. 26.

Authentic Brands claims Anthropic did not pay royalties or ask for licenses to use the music to train its AI. Instead, the company says Anthropic used "automated scraping tools" to search the internet and collect content for AI training. It alleges that Anthropic did this "throughout the entire development of its Claude models."

"The Elvis plaintiffs rely on U.S. copyright law to protect their works from infringement," Authentic Brands wrote in the lawsuit. "Without these protections, the music publishing industry would not work because songwriters, artists, and their heirs would not receive the full value of their musical works. In fact, many heirs of the original writers depend on the money these works earn."

Media companies have sued AI companies for copyright infringement for years. They want to stop AI models from using their content to train future models. Companies such as The New York Times and Disney have sued OpenAI and Midjourney.

In July of this year, Anthropic settled a lawsuit with authors for $1.5 billion. The authors had accused the company of using copyrighted books to train Claude. That case was also heard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Authentic Brands is not the only music company suing Anthropic in California's Northern District. On Oct. 21, just two days before Authentic Brands filed its case, Reservoir Media Management sued Anthropic for $149.3 million. Reservoir owns the rights to license songs by Johnny Cash, Madonna, and Joni Mitchell. It also filed a separate lawsuit against Suno, a platform that uses AI to create music.

The Reservoir lawsuit makes many of the same claims as the Authentic Brands lawsuit. In some places, the two lawsuits even use the same wording.

Authentic Brands claims that Anthropic went to great lengths to remove "metadata and identifying information" from the songs.

"This deliberate effort to remove as much metadata as possible is important because Anthropic's engineers understood, or should at least have understood, that removing CMI (Copyright Management Information) from training data would stop Claude from reproducing that information in its outputs," Authentic Brands alleged. "This would hide where copyrighted material in those outputs came from and make it harder for rights holders to find possible infringement."

Authentic Brands also claims that after Claude learned from the songs it was given, it could produce "unauthorized copies of, and derivative works based upon" the original copyrighted music.

The lawsuit argues that fair use does not protect Anthropic because the company keeps the music permanently.

"Keeping a permanent collection of copyrighted material for unlimited future use fails every part of the fair-use test," the lawsuit argued. "The goal is to acquire material, not transform it into something new; entire works are kept without limits; and the unauthorized copies can replace sales and licenses one for one."

Authentic Brands is asking the court to rule that Anthropic knowingly broke copyright law and to order the company to destroy all copyrighted works. It also wants Anthropic to pay $2,500 for each violation of a licensing agreement and $25,000 for each time copyright information was removed from a piece of music.

These penalties could total $6.85 million. Authentic Brands claims Anthropic took 274 songs.

The company is also asking the court to award legal damages of $150,000 for each song used. It estimates that this would add almost $41.1 million in damages.

Lucas Finton covers crime, policing, jails, the courts and criminal justice policy for The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached by phone at (901)208-3922 or by email at [email protected], and followed on X @LucasFinton.