Keystone/Getty Images
The suit seeks up to $48.6 million and lands days before the AI company’s IPO filing.
The companies that own Elvis Presley’s songs are taking an AI company to court. Rights holders led by a division of Authentic Brands Group, which manages Presley’s music and image, sued Anthropic on Oct. 23 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Bloomberg Law and Inc. report. Billboard first reported the case.
The complaint says Anthropic copied 274 Presley compositions without permission to train its Claude chatbot, including “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “All Shook Up,” “Don’t Be Cruel” and “A Little Less Conversation.” It also accuses the company of bypassing digital access controls and stripping songwriter and publisher credits, known as copyright management information, from the works.
The plaintiffs ask for the statutory maximum of $150,000 per song, or $41.1 million, plus about $7.5 million under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for a total near $48.6 million, TheStreet reports. They also want the court to order the destruction of training datasets and model weights that hold the alleged copies.
“Anthropic has built its entire business model on infringing copyrights at an unfathomable scale,” the complaint states. Lead attorney Richard Busch said the company grew “based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before,” per VICE.
An Anthropic spokesperson said: “We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully.” The company has argued in other cases that training on copyrighted material is fair use.
The Presley case joins a growing list of music suits against Anthropic. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord and ABKCO sued in 2023 and again in January over more than 20,000 songs, seeking more than $3 billion, Music Business Worldwide reported. Round Hill Music and Reservoir have since sued Anthropic and Suno. The Guardian called the Presley filing one of the first major complaints brought on behalf of a musician’s estate.
About the Author
