The owners of rights to much of Elvis Presley’s song catalog have sued Anthropic, claiming the artificial-intelligence giant used his songs without permission to train its online agent Claude.
Partnerships that control 274 of Presley’s best-known songs — including “All Shook Up,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Return To Sender” — said the San Francisco-based AI company had paid nothing for capturing the songs and using them to help improve Claude.
“Defendant has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before,” the plaintiffs said in a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in San Francisco.
The Elvis partnerships said that their collection includes “some of the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history.”
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Authentic Brands Group, which owns the rights to Presley, initiated the lawsuit along with other legal entities that also own the rights, according to the music industry publication Billboard.
“We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully,” an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement Sunday.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers noted in their filing that at least a half dozen suits currently pending in federal court in San Francisco related to musical compositions being improperly used to train artificial intelligence.
The lawyers for the Presley plaintiffs are seeking roughly $50 million in damages, along with reimbursement of court costs and attorneys fees.
The suit contends that Anthropic was put on notice that it was improperly accessing copyrighted material, but continued with the practice.
“Anthropic ran roughshod over the rights of countless creatives and rightsholders,” the lawsuit charged, “using their works without permission, removing identifying information from those works, and keeping ill-gotten gains for itself.”
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Anthropic stored Elvis’ songs “into a permanent, general-purpose central library intended to be retained indefinitely, from which subsets were selected and copied again to train the next generation of Claude models,” the lawsuit contends.
Anthropic’s actions allow users to create derivative songs without paying the copyright holders, the lawsuit says. And the suit suggests that Claude, itself, recognized how these new versions “keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges. That’s edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out.”
The lawsuit claims that such unauthorized reuse “is destroying the value of these works in a matter of a few years with only profit as its motive.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.