Anthropic, the company behind AI assistant Claude, faces a copyright infringement lawsuit over the alleged unauthorised use of 274 Elvis Presley songs to train its AI models.
The lawsuit was filed on October 23 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alongside other entities and rights holders with interests in Presley's music catalogue.
The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic used copyrighted songs to train Claude without permission or payment. The songs include “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, “All Shook Up” and “A Little Less Conversation”, among others.
The plaintiffs seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each of the 274 works, totalling $41.1 million. They also seek additional damages for alleged circumvention of copyright protections and removal of copyright information, bringing their total claim to about $48.6 million, according to Bloomberg Law.
The complaint alleges that Claude can generate material that reproduces or closely resembles copyrighted songs, even after Anthropic introduced safeguards intended to limit such outputs. The plaintiffs also accuse the company of using copyrighted material without authorisation during model development.
Anthropic has rejected the allegations. “We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully,” a company spokesperson said in a statement reported by the Los Angeles Times.