Damages sought could total up to $41 million
Anthropic disputed a copyright complaint alleging that five Elvis Presley songs were used to create “unlicensed derivative works.” A spokesperson told BBC News: “We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully.” The complaint also says Claude continued to infringe after Anthropic supposedly added guardrails and that recreations of songs stayed close to the originals.
Authentic Brands Group identifies All Shook Up, Can’t Help Falling in Love, A Little Less Conversation, Don’t Be Cruel and Return To Sender as five songs it says were used to create the unlicensed works. The complaint seeks up to $150,000 (£112,000) for each allegedly infringed song, for an aggregate demand of up to $41 million.
Authentic Brands Group, which owns Presley’s music, filed the case Friday and alleges Anthropic used 274 Elvis songs without paying for a license to train Claude. The complaint describes the catalog this way: “The Elvis Plaintiffs’ iconic collective catalog contains some of the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history.”
It also alleges that Anthropic “has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before” and says: “The Elvis Plaintiffs are deeply protective of these iconic songs.”
The complaint says Claude continued to infringe in one of its latest iterations even after Anthropic supposedly added guardrails following earlier lawsuits. It also says Claude admitted to crossing a line.
When recently asked to recreate specific songs “for a modern audience,” Claude did so and admitted: “These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges.” Authentic Brands Group characterizes that output as exceeding an “inspired by” claim. The complaint says: “That’s edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out.”
Anthropic is also being sued by owners of other music rights. Last week, music company Reservoir accused the company of stealing lyrics, while Universal Music Group sued it in January. Both cases remain ongoing.
Separately, Anthropic agreed last year to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action filed by authors who said it stole their work to train its AI models. Lawyers for the authors called it the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history.
Separately from the Elvis case, BBC News reported that the Pentagon stopped using Anthropic’s AI tools after Anthropic was blacklisted.