Anthropic Sued Over Unauthorized Use of Elvis Presley Songs

Authentic Brands Seeks $41.1M Over AI Training Data Theft, Including 'All Shook Up' and 'Can't Help Falling in Love'

Anthropic, the developer of the generative artificial intelligence (AI) Claude, has been embroiled in a copyright infringement lawsuit over allegations that it used legendary singer Elvis Presley's (1935-1977) songs without authorization for AI training.

According to the Los Angeles Times (LAT) and NBC on the 25th (local time), Authentic Brands Group, which manages rights to 274 of Presley's representative songs, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on the 23rd.

The plaintiffs claimed in the complaint, "Anthropic built its business model on an unprecedented scale of copyright infringement" and "used works without permission, monopolized illegally obtained profits, and disregarded the rights of creators and rights holders."

They alleged that Anthropic stored Presley's songs in its proprietary data library, used them to train the next-generation Claude model, and allowed users to generate songs similar to the originals without compensating copyright holders.

In fact, when a user requested Claude to create a song for modern music listeners, it generated a song with a structure and chorus similar to Presley's original works, the plaintiffs argued. The lawsuit includes Presley's representative songs such as 'All Shook Up' and "Can't Help Falling in Love."

The plaintiffs sought damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, totaling $41.1 million (approximately 54.5 billion Korean won). They also requested the court to permanently prohibit Anthropic's copyright infringement and destroy illegally copied materials.

Anthropic denied the allegations and stated it would actively respond to the lawsuit.

This is not the first time Anthropic has faced copyright disputes over AI training data. Last year, it agreed to pay $1.5 billion (approximately 2 trillion Korean won) in a class-action lawsuit filed by authors over the use of illegally copied books in AI training. In January this year, Universal Music and Concord Music Group filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging unauthorized use of copyrighted song lyrics.