Another blow for AI music? Anthropic hit with $41 million lawsuit by owners of Elvis Presley’s catalogue

The owners of Elvis Presley’s music catalogue have sued AI company Anthropic, claiming its Claude models were trained on 274 of his songs without permission. The plaintiffs are seeking $41.1 million in copyright infringement damages, with additional claims bringing the total to $48.6 million.

Authentic Brands Group, which holds the rights to Presley’s music and likeness, filed the federal copyright infringement suit in California on Friday, October 23, according to MusicRadar. Alongside ABG, the plaintiffs include Raleigh Music Publishing, plus several trusts. They are asking for $150,000 per infringed song, the maximum statutory figure, which comes to $41.1 million across the 274 tracks.

Anthropic has rejected the allegations. The company said it disagrees with the claims and intends to defend the case fully.

The complaint names hits including Can’t Help Falling in Love, A Little Less Conversation and Don’t Be Cruel. It alleges Claude has produced infringing output of “virtually every song from every catalogue available on the internet”, including Presley’s.

One of the suit’s most striking claims concerns Anthropic’s safeguards. The plaintiffs allege that even after the company added what it described as guardrails in response to earlier legal action, a recent version of Claude still reproduced songs when asked to recreate them “for a modern audience”.

According to the complaint, Claude then described its own results as “landing very close to the originals.”

The plaintiffs say those outputs reused the same structure and hooks with only light rewording and included full sets of verses, choruses and bridges. They argue these amount to unlicensed derivative works.

This case is notable because it is one of the first high-profile AI copyright lawsuits brought by the owner of a single artist’s catalogue. Earlier cases have come from large music publishers. Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic over song lyrics in 2023, with further action following this year.

The lawsuit follows a separate copyright dispute involving Anthropic and a group of authors, where Judge William Alsup ruled that training AI models on lawfully acquired books constituted fair use, while obtaining pirated copies did not. Whether the same reasoning applies to copyrighted music remains an open question.

The claims are currently only allegations and have not yet been brought to court.