The owners of rights to Elvis Presley’s music have sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic, accusing it of using 274 of the legendary singer’s songs to train its Claude AI model without permission or licensing payments.
According to the BBC, Authentic Brands Group, which owns the music rights, filed the lawsuit on Friday. The company alleges that Anthropic infringed copyright by using the songs without authorisation and demands compensation of up to $150,000 (£112,000) for each infringed song, bringing the total claim to $41m.
“The Elvis Plaintiffs’ iconic collective catalog contains some of the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history,” the complaint states.
An Anthropic spokesperson told BBC News that the company disagrees with the allegations and intends to defend itself fully.
Authentic Brands Group alleges in its complaint that Anthropic has built its business model around copyright infringement on an unprecedented scale. It says the company is particularly protective of Elvis’s musical legacy.
The lawsuit names several well-known songs allegedly used without permission, including All Shook Up, Can’t Help Falling in Love, A Little Less Conversation, Don’t Be Cruel and Return to Sender. Authentic Brands Group claims Anthropic used the songs to create unauthorised derivative works.
The complaint also challenges the effectiveness of safeguards Anthropic introduced following earlier copyright lawsuits. It argues that Claude continues to reproduce copyrighted material despite those measures.
The filing cites an instance in which Claude allegedly recreated specific songs for a modern audience. According to the complaint, the AI acknowledged that its outputs closely resembled the originals, retaining their structure, reusing hooks with minor changes to the wording and reproducing complete verses, choruses and bridges.
The complaint quotes Claude as saying: “These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges.”
It also cites the AI’s alleged acknowledgement that such outputs crossed the line between drawing inspiration from a song and reproducing copyrighted material with altered lyrics.
The Elvis case adds to Anthropic’s growing legal challenges over the use of copyrighted material to train AI models. Last week, music company Reservoir accused the company of stealing song lyrics. Universal Music Group also sued Anthropic in January. Both cases remain ongoing.
Last year, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5bn to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by authors who accused the company of using their work without permission to train its AI models. Lawyers for the authors described the settlement as the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history.
