Authentic Brands Group, the entity controlling the licensing of Elvis Presley’s music and likeness, has filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Anthropic. The legal action, reported first by Billboard, accuses the developer of the Claude language model of using 274 of Presley’s songs to train its systems without authorization.
The complaint, filed in federal court on Friday, seeks $150,000 in damages for each infringed track. This figure totals approximately $41 million. The suit identifies specific hits such as “All Shook Up,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and “Don’t Be Cruel,” alongside lesser-known recordings from the artist’s catalog.
Legal Precedent and Derivative Works
Richard Busch, the lead attorney for the Elvis Plaintiffs, described the lawsuit as an effort to enforce exclusive rights against a business model he characterizes as built on copyright infringement. Busch has previously represented the Marvin Gaye estate in its high-profile case against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over the song “Blurred Lines.” That case established that substantial similarity in musical composition could constitute infringement even without direct copying of lyrics.
The current filing argues that Anthropic is creating unlicensed derivative works. The complaint states that Claude has generated output containing copyrighted material from virtually every song available on the internet. According to the lawsuit, the AI model continued to produce infringing content even after Anthropic implemented safety guardrails following previous legal challenges from major record labels.
The document includes a specific example where Claude was asked to recreate Presley songs for a modern audience. The model reportedly admitted that its renders landed very close to the originals, reusing the same structure and hooks with only light rewording. The lawsuit asserts this crosses the line from inspiration into direct reproduction of copyrighted works.
Shift in AI Litigation Landscape
This case represents a notable shift in the legal battles surrounding artificial intelligence. Previous major lawsuits against AI developers were brought by large record labels like Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, as well as the Recording Industry Association of America. Those cases focused on the unauthorized use of sound recordings and the broader music industry infrastructure.
The Elvis Presley lawsuit is one of the first major instances where an artist’s estate has taken direct legal action against an AI company. It highlights the growing concern among individual rights holders and their representatives regarding the scale of data scraping used to train large language models. The plaintiffs argue that Anthropic has built its entire business model on this infringement at a scale never seen before.
Authentic Brands Group maintains that the plaintiffs are deeply protective of Presley’s iconic songs. The legal team is seeking to establish that the commercial use of these works by an AI company constitutes a direct violation of federal copyright law. The case will likely influence how other estates and artists approach the intersection of intellectual property and generative AI technologies.
The lawsuit names ABE EPE LLC as the plaintiff alongside the estate. It requests that the court find Anthropic liable for direct and contributory copyright infringement. The outcome could set a precedent for how AI companies must handle copyrighted musical compositions in their training datasets.
Source: Rolling Stone
