Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) company, is facing a copyright lawsuit over allegations t.. - MK

Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) company, is facing a copyright lawsuit over allegations that it trained its models on songs by legendary singer Elvis Presley without authorization.

The Los Angeles Times (LAT) and NBC reported on the 25th local time that several organizations, including Authentic Brands Group, which manages 274 of Elvis Presley's hit songs, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic on the 23rd in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

In their complaint, the plaintiffs claimed that Anthropic "built its business model on copyright infringement on an unprecedented scale," using works without permission from their copyright holders and keeping all the resulting profits for itself.

According to the complaint, Anthropic stored Presley's songs in its own library and used them to train next-generation Claude models. The plaintiffs allege that this enabled Claude users to create songs derived from the originals without paying copyright holders separately.

The plaintiffs also cited examples in which Claude recreated songs using arrangements and choruses similar to Presley's originals when users asked it to make songs for modern music listeners.

The works covered by the lawsuit include such Presley hits as "All Shook Up" and "Can't Help Falling in Love."

The plaintiffs are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per work. Their claim for 274 works totals $41.1 million (about 54.5 billion won). They also asked the court to permanently prohibit Anthropic's copyright infringement and order it to destroy unauthorized copies.

Anthropic said it disagreed with the plaintiffs' claims and would actively contest the lawsuit.

This is not the first copyright dispute involving Anthropic. Last year, the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit by authors who accused it of using pirated books without authorization to train its models.