Owners of Elvis music rights sue Anthropic for copyright violations

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The owners of the rights to music by Elvis Presley have sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic, claiming in court that the company violated copyright law by using Elvis music to train its AI model Claude.

In a legal case filed on Friday, Authentic Brands Group – which owns the music – accused Anthropic of using 274 Elvis songs without paying for any licence.

“The Elvis Plaintiffs’ iconic collective catalog contains some of the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history,” the case states.

A spokesperson for Anthropic told BBC News: “We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully.”

Authentic Brands alleges in its legal complaint that Anthropic “has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before”, according to the court filing seen by the BBC.

“The Elvis Plaintiffs are deeply protective of these iconic songs.”

It argues that songs that were infringed 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.

These songs were used to create “unlicensed derivative works”, Authentic Brands says.

The legal complaint asks for payments of up to $150,000 (£112,000) per infringed song, adding up to $41m.

Anthropic is also being sued by the owners of other music rights.

Last week, it was accused of stealing lyrics by music company Reservoir. In January, it was sued by Universal Music Group. Both cases remain ongoing.

Authentic Brands’ legal complaint references other legal actions, and says that Claude admitted to crossing 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 settle a class action legal case filed by authors who said the company stole their work to train its AI models.

The lawsuit was the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, according to lawyers for the authors.

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