Rights holders in Elvis Presley‘s music have sued Anthropic, alleging that it used 274 songs without permission to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. The plaintiffs seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 per song, totaling approximately $41.1 million.
The lawsuit was filed on Friday, October 23, by a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group and other companies with interests in Presley’s music. Authentic Brands Group controls Presley’s intellectual property, including rights to his name, image and likeness.
The complaint identifies songs associated with Presley, including:
- “All Shook Up”
- “Can’t Help Falling in Love”
- “A Little Less Conversation”
The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, used copyrighted songs for model training without securing permission or paying licensing fees. They also allege that the resulting models can generate unauthorized versions of existing songs.
Anthropic has not publicly commented on the lawsuit. The company has maintained that training AI models on copyrighted material can and should qualify for protection under U.S. fair use law.
“The Elvis Plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before,” said Richard Busch, lead attorney for the plaintiffs.
Anthropic also faces copyright infringement allegations from Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music.
