The owners of Elvis Presley’s music catalog are suing artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic for allegedly using Presley’s songs to train their models without permission.
Authentic Brands Group, the licensing organization that owns Presley’s music and likeness, accuses Anthropic of violating the rights to 274 Presley songs. The lawsuit, first reported by Billboard, was filed Friday.
While AI companies have previously faced copyright infringement claims from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and music labels such as Sony, Universal, and Warner Records, this case represents one of the first major legal challenges brought directly by an artist’s estate against an AI developer. The result could set a broader precedent for how AI companies are allowed to use existing music catalogs.
“The Elvis Plaintiffs bring this action to assert these exclusive rights against the Defendant who has built his entire business model based on copyright infringement on a scale never before seen,” lead attorney Richard Busch wrote in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit claims that “since its inception, Anthropic’s AI model, ‘Claude,’ has created an illicit production of copyrighted material of virtually every song in every catalog available on the Internet.”
It further accuses Anthropic of using 274 Presley songs to train its AI model. These works include Can’t Help Falling in Love, All Shook Up and A Little Less Conversation. The plaintiffs are seeking $150,000 per infringed track, or around $41 million (around £31 million).
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“Even Anthropic’s establishment of safeguards (albeit ineffective) to allegedly limit productions that infringe music copyrights, after being stopped, as well as its knowledge that its safeguards were ineffective in stopping the creation of productions that infringe music copyrights, demonstrates that Anthropic knowingly engaged in and continues to willfully engage in musical copyright infringement of others,” the lawsuit states.
AI music platforms work by analyzing large quantities of recorded music to learn song sounds, structures and expressions, then allow users to create their own AI-generated music via text or voice prompts.
Musicians have repeatedly expressed concern that their music and voices are being used without their permission by AI models, as well as fear that AI-generated “slop” music will replace human-created songs.
Some AI robots have even started posing as real live artists on music streaming platforms. Last week, music streaming giant Spotify announced that it had removed about 50 million songs deemed AI errors from its recommendations to users over the past year.
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