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

Key Points:

• Authentic Brands Group and other rights holders of Elvis Presley’s music have sued AI company Anthropic, alleging unauthorized use of Presley’s copyrighted lyrics to train its AI models and generate infringing song versions.
• The lawsuit claims Anthropic infringed copyrights on 274 songs, including iconic hits like “All Shook Up” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” without licenses or payments throughout the development of its Claude AI models.
• Plaintiffs accuse Anthropic of mass scraping copyrighted content and continuing to produce outputs that closely replicate Presley’s songs, despite supposed “guardrails” to prevent infringement.
• Anthropic denies the allegations and intends to defend itself, but the Presley rights holders seek $41.1 million in damages and a permanent injunction to stop further unauthorized use and require destruction of infringing copies.
• This lawsuit is part of a broader wave of legal actions against Anthropic and other AI companies for alleged copyright violations involving music and literary works, following Anthropic’s previous $1.5 billion settlement over book piracy claims.