A lawsuit over 274 Presley songs
The entities that control Elvis Presley's music filed a complaint on Friday accusing Anthropic of using his copyrighted lyrics without authorization to develop its artificial intelligence models and of producing output that infringes on his songs. Authentic Brands Group, the licensing platform holding Presley's intellectual property, brought the case alongside other companies, trusts and individuals with rights to the catalog. The plaintiffs say 274 compositions were exploited with neither a license nor payment.[S1][S2][S3][S4][S5][S6][S7][S8]
Among the works named are some of Presley's best-known recordings, including All Shook Up, Can't Help Falling in Love, Don't Be Cruel, A Little Less Conversation and Return to Sender. The complaint characterizes the group's combined catalog as containing compositions of exceptional influence and durability. The filing argues that the alleged infringement ran through the whole of the development of Anthropic's flagship Claude models and persists as users prompt the system to reproduce lyrics or generate unauthorized adaptations.[S1]
What the complaint alleges about Claude
The plaintiffs contend that Anthropic's business rests on copyright infringement carried out at enormous scale, citing what they describe as mass scraping of internet material and the pirating of books to build the Claude language models. They also assert that safeguards introduced after earlier litigation have not stopped the problem, saying that in a recent version Claude still infringed. According to the complaint, when the model was recently asked to rework particular songs for a contemporary audience, it complied.[S1]
The filing describes those outputs as landing very near the originals, retaining the same structure and reusing hooks with only slight rewording, alongside complete sets of verses, choruses and bridges. In the plaintiffs' account, that crosses from being merely inspired by a song into reproducing it, even where individual words have been changed.[S1]
Damages sought and Anthropic's response
The rights holders are asking for $41.1 million in statutory copyright damages, calculated at up to $150,000 for each of the 274 works they say were willfully infringed, according to the complaint. They further seek a permanent injunction barring Anthropic from further infringement of Presley's works and an order requiring the company to destroy all unauthorized copies. Richard Busch, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in a statement that the group guards Presley's songs and described them as among the most iconic ever written.[S1]
Anthropic rejected the allegations and said it would contest the case fully. The company has faced mounting litigation over its training practices: last year it reached a landmark $1.5 billion settlement with authors who alleged pirated copies of their books were used to train its models, the largest settlement in the history of American copyright cases.[S1]
A widening wave of music lawsuits
The Presley case is one of many filed against Anthropic and other AI companies that are accused of using protected songs without permission or payment. Earlier in January, Universal Music, Concord Music Group and ABKCO Music broadened a lawsuit of their own against Anthropic concerning lyrics. BMG Rights Management, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed comparable suits during the year.[S1]
Round Hill, an independent publisher represented by Busch, and Reservoir Media, an independent music company, have also recently taken legal action against Anthropic and the AI music generator Suno. The fight over Presley's catalog is thus part of a larger struggle over the way AI companies secure the creative works used to build their systems.[S1]
