Elvis Presleys rights holders sue Anthropic saying it trained AI on his music

The owners of Elvis Presley’s music have sued Anthropic for allegedly using his copyrighted lyrics without permission to train its AI models and generating infringing versions of his songs.In a lawsuit filed Friday, Authentic Brands Group, the licensing platform that controls Presley’s intellectual property — along with other companies, trusts and individuals who own rights to his music — accused Anthropic of infringing copyrights to 274 songs without any license or payment.These span some of Presley’s biggest hits, including “All Shook Up,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “A Little Less Conversation” and “Return to Sender.”“The Elvis Plaintiffs’ iconic collective catalog contains some of the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history,” the lawsuit stated.The plaintiffs allege that the infringement has occurred throughout “the entire development” of Anthropic’s flagship Claude models and continues today as users generate outputs that reproduce copyrighted lyrics or create unauthorized adaptations of the songs.“As we say in the lawsuit, the Elvis Plaintiffs are guardians of, and highly protective of, Elvis’s song which are some of the most iconic of all time,” attorney Richard Busch wrote in a statement.A spokesperson for Anthropic wrote: “We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully.”Elvis Presley performs circa 1975.Fotos International / Getty The complaint further describes Anthropic as having “built its entire business model on infringing copyrights at an unfathomable scale,” pointing to the alleged mass scraping of internet content and pirating of books to develop its Claude language models.Last year, Anthropic agreed to a landmark $1.5 billion settlement in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by authors who alleged the company had illegally used pirated copies of their books to train AI models.It was the la...