Elvis Presley catalogue owners sue Anthropic over 274 songs used in AI training

Authentic Brands Group, which owns rights to Elvis Presley’s music and likeness, has sued artificial intelligence developer Anthropic. The company is accused of using Presley’s songs to train its models without permission.

The lawsuit, first reported by Billboard, was filed on Friday. It alleges infringement involving 274 songs, including Can’t Help Falling in Love, All Shook Up and A Little Less Conversation.

The plaintiffs are seeking $150,000 for each song, or about $41 million in total.

Claims involving Claude

The complaint alleges that Anthropic’s Claude model has generated infringing material involving songs from catalogues available online since its launch. Authentic Brands Group also claims the safeguards introduced by Anthropic failed to adequately prevent such outputs.

The case is being led by attorney Richard Busch. He argues that the lawsuit seeks to enforce the catalogue owners’ exclusive rights against what they describe as unprecedented-scale use of copyrighted music.

It is among the first major lawsuits against an AI developer brought directly on behalf of an individual artist’s estate. Earlier copyright claims over music used to train AI systems were brought by the RIAA, Sony, Universal and Warner Records.

AI music platforms analyze large amounts of recorded music to learn songs’ sounds, structures and expressions. Musicians have raised concerns about their music and voices being used without permission, while Spotify said last week that it had removed about 50 million tracks it considered low-quality AI music from user recommendations over the previous year.