The owners of Elvis Presley’s music sued Anthropic on Friday, October 23, accusing the company behind Claude of training its models on 274 Presley songs without permission or payment. The lawsuit seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per song, about $41 million in total. It was brought by a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group, which controls much of Presley’s intellectual property, alongside other companies holding rights to his music. The complaint says Claude kept producing near-replicas of the songs even after Anthropic introduced safeguards meant to stop it. Anthropic has not publicly responded to the suit, though it has previously maintained that training AI models on copyrighted material can be protected under fair use law.
What the lawsuit claims
The suit, first reported by Billboard, alleges that Anthropic infringed the copyrights of 274 songs associated with Presley, including some of his best-known hits: ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’, ‘All Shook Up’, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’, ‘A Little Less Conversation’, ‘Return To Sender’ and ‘(You’re The) Devil In Disguise’. The plaintiffs say Anthropic used copyrighted compositions and lyrics to train its AI models without obtaining permission or paying the relevant rights holders, and that the technology is capable of generating unauthorised versions of existing songs. Lead attorney Richard Busch said the plaintiffs brought the action to enforce their exclusive rights against a defendant that, in his words, built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before, adding that they are deeply protective of these iconic songs. Busch previously represented Marvin Gaye’s estate in its landmark ‘Blurred Lines’ case against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams.
The ‘modern audience’ test
The complaint’s sharpest allegation concerns what Claude does when asked to recreate songs. According to the filing, when Claude was asked to recreate specific songs “for a modern audience”, it produced material that closely resembled the originals. The filing quotes the assistant itself acknowledging that the renders keep landing very close to the originals, with the same structure, hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses, choruses and bridges — edging past inspired-by territory into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out. The suit further claims Claude has created infringing output from virtually every song catalog available on the internet, and that the problem continued even after Anthropic supposedly put up guardrails following earlier lawsuits.
Why It Matters
This is one of the first times an individual artist’s estate, rather than a record label or publisher, has brought legal action of this scale against an AI company, and Billboard calls it the most prominent legal action so far brought on behalf of a single musician. That matters because it gives other estates a template: a famous catalog, a clear set of songs, and a concrete claim about outputs, not just training. If courts accept that a chatbot’s near-replicas count as reproductions, Anthropic’s fair-use defence gets harder to sustain across dozens of pending cases. For now, though, the company has said nothing publicly about this filing, and the case will turn on whether training ingestion plus reproducing outputs together amount to infringement at the scale the plaintiffs allege.
Background
Anthropic already faces a string of music-copyright cases, including an October 2023 suit from Universal Music Publishing, Concord and ABKCO over reproduced lyrics, an August action from Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell covering artists from The Beatles to Taylor Swift, and a September case in which Jason Isbell and other musicians sued AI music generator Suno, following the same pattern as Canada’s biggest publishers suing Anthropic over Claude training and the company’s draft IPO filing showing an $80.7 billion loss.
Source: NME, Far Out Magazine
0 Comments