The licence holders of the Elvis back catalogue have filed a $41 million lawsuit against the AI Anthropic for the illegal use of scores of the King’s songs.
They allege that Anthropic has trained its AI model Claude on some 274 Presley songs, without permission. Authentic Brands, which is the group that currently holds the Elvis copyright, is seeking roughly $150,000 per song, which works out to $41 million in total.
In a statement, the group’s lead attorney Richard Busch has written: “The Elvis Plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before. The Elvis Plaintiffs are deeply protective of these iconic songs.”
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It’s not the first time Anthropic has been hit with a lawsuit for stealing copyrighted material. Just last week, Universal Music Publishing, Concord and ABKCO slapped an action on the San Francisco-based tech firm for infringing the copyright of over 500 songs, including Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come, Every Breath You Take by The Police and Beyoncé’s Halo. This, though, is the first time the owner of a single artist’s catalogue has sued.
According to Authentic, the AI model Claude has used the Elvis songs to create ‘unlicensed derivative works’ which were ridiculously close to the originals.
The lawsuit reads: “Even after the Defendant supposedly put up ‘guardrails’ after being sued, in one of its latest iterations, Claude continues to infringe: 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.”
“That’s edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out.’”
Needless to say, Anthropic denies the allegations. “We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully,” it has said in a statement.
