Owners of Elvis Presley’s Catalog Sue Anthropic for $41.1 Million, Claiming AI Company Pirated Star’s Music to Train Claude

NEED TO KNOW

• The owners of Elvis Presley's music catalog say Anthropic used 274 songs without permission to train Claude.

• The lawsuit seeks $41.1 million in damages and asks for a jury trial in California.

• Anthropic denies the claims as more lawsuits over music copyrights continue to be filed.

The owners of Elvis Presley's music catalog have sued Anthropic for copyright infringement. They say the AI company used hundreds of songs by the late rock star to train its AI models without permission.

The people bringing the lawsuit include licensing company Authentic Brands Group, Raleigh Music Publishing, and several trusts. They say Anthropic harmed the value of Presley's music catalog and are seeking $41.1 million. The complaint was filed in California on Oct. 23.

In the complaint, obtained by PEOPLE, the plaintiffs compare Anthropic's actions to the idea that monkeys using typewriters could eventually write Shakespeare's play Hamlet. They say that instead of waiting for an AI model to create something entirely new on its own, Anthropic took an easier path by copying existing work, which they describe as copyright infringement.

The complaint claims that since Anthropic launched its AI assistant Claude in 2023, the model has taken from “almost every song in every catalog available on the internet,” including 274 songs by Presley, who died in 1977.

An Anthropic spokesperson told PEOPLE that the company “disagrees with the claims and intends to fight this case fully.”

The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of taking a huge amount of text from different places on the internet and storing it in one central library. It says the company then used that material to train Claude models.

The plaintiffs say they regularly make licensing deals and other agreements that allow people to use Presley's songs in exchange for payments to the copyright owners. According to the complaint, Anthropic used “illegal copies” of Presley's copyrighted lyrics without a license or payment, ignoring U.S. copyright law.

The complaint also says that when Claude was recently asked to recreate specific songs for a modern audience, the AI assistant responded that the results “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.”

At least six similar lawsuits about music copyright have reportedly been filed in the same court. Just last week, music company Reservoir sued Anthropic, accusing it of taking copyrighted lyrics and melodies from artists such as Madonna and Joni Mitchell. Anthropic told Billboard that it disagreed with the allegations.

The plaintiffs want a jury to hear the case. They are seeking $150,000 for each song, which they say would add up to $41.1 million.

“In other copyright infringement cases,” the complaint says, the company has spoken at length about the need for progress and the value of AI to society. But the plaintiffs argue that progress should not come at the expense of copyright owners simply because copying existing work is easier.

Read the original article on People.