Owners of Elvis music rights sue Anthropic for copyright violations
The company is accused of using hundreds of songs by the American rock-and-roll star to train its Claude AI model.
Owners of Elvis music rights sue Anthropic for copyright violations
The holders of the rights to Elvis Presley’s music have taken artificial intelligence company Anthropic to court, alleging that the company broke copyright law by using Elvis songs to train its AI model Claude.
In a lawsuit filed on Friday, Authentic Brands Group, which owns the music, said Anthropic used 274 Elvis songs without paying for a license.
“The Elvis Plaintiffs' iconic collective catalog contains some of the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history,” the filing says.
A spokesperson for Anthropic told BBC News: “We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully.”
According to court papers seen by the BBC, Authentic Brands claims in its complaint that Anthropic “has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before”.
“The Elvis Plaintiffs are deeply protective of these iconic songs.”
The complaint says the infringed songs include hits such as All Shook Up, Can't Help Falling in Love, A Little Less Conversation, Don't Be Cruel and Return To Sender.
Authentic Brands says those songs were used to produce “unlicensed derivative works”.
The lawsuit seeks payments of up to $150,000 (£112,000) for each infringed song, which could total $41m.
Anthropic is also facing lawsuits from other music rights owners.
Last week, music company Reservoir accused it of stealing lyrics. In January, Universal Music Group sued it. Both cases are still ongoing.
Authentic Brands’ complaint refers to other legal actions and says Claude admitted it had crossed a line.
“Even after the Defendant supposedly put up 'guardrails' after being sued, in one of its latest iterations, Claude continues to infringe,” it says.
“When recently asked to recreate specific songs 'for a modern audience,' Claude 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."
Last year, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5bn to resolve a class action lawsuit brought by authors who said the company stole their work to train its AI models.
Lawyers for the authors said the case was the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history.