Elvis Presley's rights holders sue Anthropic saying it trained AI on his music

The owners of Elvis Presley’s music have sued Anthropic for allegedly using his copyrighted lyrics without permission to train its AI models and generating infringing versions of his songs.

In a lawsuit filed Friday, Authentic Brands Group, the licensing platform that controls Presley’s intellectual property — along with other companies, trusts and individuals who own rights to his music — accused Anthropic of infringing copyrights to 274 songs without any license or payment.

These span some of Presley’s biggest hits, including “All Shook Up,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “A Little Less Conversation” and “Return to Sender.”

“The Elvis Plaintiffs’ iconic collective catalog contains some of the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history,” the lawsuit stated.

The plaintiffs allege that the infringement has occurred throughout “the entire development” of Anthropic’s flagship Claude models and continues today as users generate outputs that reproduce copyrighted lyrics or create unauthorized adaptations of the songs.

“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,” attorney Richard Busch wrote in a statement.

A spokesperson for Anthropic wrote: “We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully.”

The complaint further describes Anthropic as having “built its entire business model on infringing copyrights at an unfathomable scale,” pointing to the alleged mass scraping of internet content and pirating of books to develop its Claude language models.

Last year, Anthropic agreed to a landmark $1.5 billion settlement in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by authors who alleged the company had illegally used pirated copies of their books to train AI models. It was the largest settlement in the history of American copyright cases.

The lawsuit by Presley’s rights holders comes amid a larger wave of lawsuits against Anthropic and other AI companies for allegedly using copyrighted musical works without consent or compensation.

In January, Universal Music, Concord Music Group and ABKCO Music expanded their lawsuit against Anthropic over the alleged infringement of copyrighted song lyrics. BMG Rights Management, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed similar lawsuits against Anthropic this year.

Anthropic and the AI music generation company Suno were also recently hit with lawsuits from the independent music publisher Round Hill — which is represented by Busch, the lead attorney for Presley’s rights holders — and the independent music company Reservoir Media.

“Even after the Defendant supposedly put up ‘guardrails’ after being sued, in one of its latest iterations, Claude continues to infringe,” the Presley rights holders state in their lawsuit.

The complaint notes that when asked recently to re-create specific songs “for a modern audience,” Claude did so.

“These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges,” the complaint said. “That’s edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out.”

Presley’s rights holders are seeking $41.1 million in statutory copyright damages — up to $150,000 for each of the 274 works they alleged were willfully infringed — according to the complaint.

They also demand a permanent injunction to prevent Anthropic from “further infringing” on Presley’s works and an order for the company to destroy all unauthorized copies of the copyrighted works.