The owners of Elvis Presley's music sue Anthropic over 274 songs
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
Authentic Brands Group, which handles Elvis Presley's music and image, has taken Anthropic to court for training its AI models on 274 of the singer's songs without asking permission. It is claiming $150,000 per track, roughly $41 million. The complaint adds that Claude still remakes protected songs when prompted, despite the limits the company introduced.
The owners of the rights to Elvis Presley's music have sued Anthropic, the company that develops the AI assistant Claude. The suit was filed on Friday, October 23, and was first reported by Billboard: it was brought by a unit of Authentic Brands Group, the licensing group that controls much of Elvis's catalog, his trademarks and the rights to his name and image, together with other companies that also hold rights to the singer's work. It accuses Anthropic of using 274 Presley songs without permission to train its models.
The works it lists include "Don't Be Cruel", "Can't Help Falling in Love", "Return to Sender", "All Shook Up" and "A Little Less Conversation". According to Rolling Stone, the case is titled ABE EPE LLC v. Anthropic and seeks $150,000 per song, roughly $41 million in total.
The complaint, as quoted by Rolling Stone, argues that Claude keeps producing copies of protected songs even though Anthropic, according to the plaintiffs, set up limits after it was sued. When asked to remake specific songs "for a modern audience," it did so, and the assistant itself acknowledged that the results stayed very close to the originals, keeping the same structure and barely reworded hooks.
Lead attorney Richard Busch represented Eminem in lawsuits over digital downloads in the 2000s and later acted for Marvin Gaye's heirs against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, a case in which he won a widely debated ruling finding that Thicke and Pharrell's "Blurred Lines" copied Gaye's song "Got to Give It Up". Billboard calls this suit the most prominent legal action so far brought on behalf of a single musician. Anthropic did not reply on Saturday to the outlet's request for comment.
This is not the first suit of its kind against the company. AI companies argue that training their models on existing works is covered by the fair use exception, an issue still unresolved in dozens of cases, according to Billboard. Anthropic had already been sued by Universal Music Publishing, Concord, BMG and Abkco over the use of song lyrics to train Claude, and in August the publisher Round Hill went to court against both Anthropic and Suno, according to The Hollywood Reporter. On Wednesday, October 21, the publisher Reservoir followed with another suit against the two companies, as reported by Billboard.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
Until now, the music industry's lawsuits against AI companies were brought by record labels and publishers with huge catalogs; the fact that whoever controls the work of a single, highly recognizable artist is now doing so changes the tone of the conflict and may encourage others to follow the same path. The trickiest part for Anthropic is not so much the training, which judges have yet to settle, as the accusation that its assistant keeps returning songs that are almost identical to the originals: that is easier to show in court. Anyone using AI assistants to write copy, ads or songs would do well to review what they get before publishing it, because looking too much like a well-known work can end up being their own problem and not just the provider's.
Source: Billboard · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
