Authentic Brands Group and other owners of Elvis Presley’s catalogue filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic on Friday. They want about $41.1m from the company behind Claude, or $150,000 for each of 274 songs.
Billboard first reported the suit. The plaintiffs filed it in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. They include Raleigh Music Publishing, several trusts and at least one individual, as Derrick Bryson Taylor reported for The New York Times.
The songs named include “All Shook Up”, “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Return to Sender”. The plaintiffs say Anthropic used their lyrics to train Claude without a licence or payment.
“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 complaint says.
Anthropic gave a short statement to The Hollywood Reporter.
“We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully,” an Anthropic spokesperson said.
The company has argued in other cases that training its models on lyrics is fair use under US law.
What the suit says about Claude
The complaint says the alleged copying ran through “the entire development” of Claude. It says the copying goes on today, as users ask the chatbot for lyrics or new versions of the songs. Angela Yang and Austin Mullen reported this for NBC News.
The suit also accuses Anthropic of getting around measures that protect the music. It says the company removed or changed copyright management information.
The plaintiffs say guardrails Anthropic added after earlier suits do not work. They say someone recently asked Claude to recreate specific songs “for a modern audience”. Claude did so and then wrote this, according to the complaint:
“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.”
The plaintiffs also want a jury trial and a permanent injunction. They ask the court to order Anthropic to destroy unauthorised copies.
A run of music cases
Their lead attorney is Richard Busch, as Stuart Dredge noted for Music Ally. Busch also acts for Round Hill Music and Reservoir Media. Both have sued Anthropic and the AI music company Suno, Round Hill in August and Reservoir last week.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic in August over lyrics in Claude’s training data. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord and ABKCO first sued in 2023 and widened their case in January. BMG filed its own suit in March. Labels have also been suing Suno again over recordings.
Anthropic also agreed to pay $1.5bn to settle a class action by authors over pirated books.
The Elvis plaintiffs sued three days before Anthropic made public the S-1 for its IPO on Nasdaq.