Elvis's rights holders seek $41.1 million from Anthropic over songs used to train AI

Dubai: The owners of Elvis Presley's music have sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic, alleging it used 274 of his songs without permission to train its Claude AI models.

The lawsuit was filed on Friday, October 23, in federal court in San Francisco, where Anthropic is based. It is led by Authentic Brands Group, the licensing company that controls Presley's intellectual property, together with other companies, trusts and individuals who hold rights to his music.

Anthropic has rejected the claims. "We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully," a company spokesperson said in a statement on Sunday.

The 274 songs named in the complaint include lesser-known tracks as well as some of Presley's best-known hits, such as:

"The Elvis Plaintiffs' iconic collective catalog contains some of the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history," the lawsuit states.

The plaintiffs claim Anthropic used Presley's copyrighted lyrics and compositions throughout "the entire development" of its Claude models, without a licence or payment.

"Defendant has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before," the complaint says.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the lawsuit alleges that Anthropic put the songs "into a permanent, general-purpose central library intended to be retained indefinitely, from which subsets were selected and copied again to train the next generation of Claude models".

The complaint also argues that Claude continues to produce infringing material when users ask it to.

"Even after the Defendant supposedly put up 'guardrails' after being sued, in one of its latest iterations, Claude continues to infringe," it states.

According to the plaintiffs, Claude recreated specific songs when asked to do so "for a modern audience". Their filing quotes a response from the chatbot:

"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."

The rights holders are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 (Dh550,875) for each of the 274 songs, which they allege were wilfully infringed. That comes to about $41.1 million (Dh150.9 million).

They are also asking for a permanent injunction to stop Anthropic from "further infringing" on Presley's works, and an order for the company to destroy all unauthorised copies.

The case is led by attorney Richard Busch, who previously represented Marvin Gaye's family in the Blurred Lines copyright case against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams.

"As we say in the lawsuit, the Elvis Plaintiffs are guardians of, and highly protective of, Elvis's song which are some of the most iconic of all time," Busch said in a statement.

The Presley case is the latest in a series of music-industry copyright lawsuits against AI companies.

Universal Music, Concord Music Group and ABKCO first sued Anthropic in 2023 over song lyrics, and expanded that case in January. BMG Rights Management, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed similar suits this year. Two independent music companies have also sued Anthropic and the AI music generator Suno: Round Hill, which Busch also represents, and Reservoir Media.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the plaintiffs' lawyers noted that at least half a dozen related cases are pending in federal court in San Francisco.

Anthropic has previously argued that training AI models on copyrighted material can be protected under the US legal doctrine of fair use.

This is not the company's first major copyright case. Last year, it agreed to pay $1.5 billion (Dh5.5 billion) to settle a lawsuit brought by authors who alleged it had used pirated copies of their books to train its models. It was the largest settlement in the history of US copyright cases.

The Presley lawsuit is at an early stage, and none of the claims have been tested in court.