The holder of Elvis Presley's music catalog is taking the AI company Anthropic to court, accusing it of using Presley's songs to train AI models without permission.
Authentic Brands Group, which controls Presley's copyrights and likeness rights, accuses Anthropic of infringing rights to 274 of its songs, with the lawsuit filed in court last Friday. As one of the first major cases in which an artist's estate directly sues an AI developer, the ruling could set a precedent for AI's use of existing music catalogs. Lead attorney Richard Busch said the plaintiffs are acting to defend their exclusive rights: "The defendants' entire business model is built on copyright infringement of an unprecedented scale."
$150,000 sought per song
The lawsuit states that from its inception, Claude could generate infringing content for nearly all the songs in the catalog, and that Presley's 274 songs were used in training, including "Can't Help Falling in Love," "All Shook Up," and "A Little Less Conversation." The plaintiffs are seeking $150,000 (about 1.003 million yuan) per song, totaling approximately $41 million (about 274 million yuan).
The harsher accusation is "willful infringement": Anthropic only added safeguards after being caught, limiting the output of infringing music, and the mechanism was ineffective — knowing it could not stop the model from continuing to emit infringing content, it still let it happen.
These concerns are not unfounded. AI music platforms generate new songs by analyzing massive amounts of recordings and learning timbres and structures, which has made musicians fear their voices will be exploited for free and replaced by shoddy AI songs. Last week, Spotify disclosed that over the past year it removed about 50 million such low-quality AI songs from its recommendation streams.