Elvis Presley’s music rights holders have accused artificial intelligence company Anthropic of using 274 songs without permission to train its AI models, according to a lawsuit.
The complaint was filed by a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group, which controls much of Presley’s intellectual property, including his name, image and likeness rights, alongside other companies that own rights to his music.
The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI chatbot, infringed copyrights in 274 songs associated with Presley, including some of his best-known hits, such as “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “All Shook Up,” “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Devil in Disguise.”
Anthropic did not publicly respond to the lawsuit. The company has previously argued that training AI models on copyrighted material is permitted under U.S. fair use law.
Richard Busch, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, alleges that Claude continued to reproduce copyrighted material despite safeguards introduced by Anthropic to prevent the chatbot from generating existing song lyrics.
The plaintiffs are seeking $150,000 in damages per song, amounting to about $41.1 million for the 274 songs.
Busch previously represented the estate of Marvin Gaye in a landmark copyright lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over their 2013 hit “Blurred Lines.” The case ultimately resulted in a finding that the song infringed the copyright of Gaye’s 1977 track “Got to Give It Up.”
In October 2023, Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO also sued Anthropic, alleging that Claude reproduced copyrighted song lyrics without authorization. The music publishers cited examples involving songs by Katy Perry, Gloria Gaynor and the Rolling Stones.
