The owners of Elvis Presley’s music have sued AI company Anthropic, accusing them of training their models on Presley’s music without permission.
Billboard first reported that Authentic Brands Group, the licensing group that controls King’s music and image, filed a lawsuit Friday, alleging that Anthropic — the AI giant behind Claude — had violated the rights to 274 of Presley’s songs.
AI companies have already faced lawsuits from record labels like Universal and Warner Bros. as well as the RIAA, but this is one of the first major cases where an artist’s estate has filed a lawsuit against an AI company.
“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. “Elvis Plaintiffs Deeply Protect These Iconic Songs.”
The ABE EPE LLC lawsuit against Anthropic says the AI company practiced on 274 of Presley’s songs — from hits like “All Shook Up,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Don’t Be Cruel” to lesser-known tracks. The lawsuit seeks $150,000 per infringed piece, or approximately $41 million.
“‘Claude’ created an infringing production of copyrighted material of virtually every song in every catalog available on the Internet, including the Works,” the lawsuit states. “Even after the defendant supposedly put up ‘guardrails’ after being sued, in one of his latest iterations, Claude continues to violate: When recently asked to recreate specific songs ‘for a modern audience,’ Claude did so and admitted: ‘These renditions continue to land very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rephrasing and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges It’s a frontier beyond inspiration by ‘reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the lyrics are swapped.’
As Billboard notes, Busch has previously served as a lawyer in lawsuits like the Marvin Gaye estate’s groundbreaking suit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell over “Blurred Lines.” As in that case, the lawsuit contends that Anthropic uses Presley’s songs to create “unlicensed derivative works” using their AI models.
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