The rights holders of American singer Elvis Presley’s music have filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Anthropic, alleging that the company used 274 of his songs to train its AI models without permission or license.
The plaintiffs have demanded about $41.1 million in damages, while the company has denied the allegations and announced a vigorous defense of the case.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Francisco. The action is being led by the licensing company Authentic Brands Group, which controls Elvis Presley’s intellectual property rights. It is also joined by other companies, trusts and individuals who own the music rights.
The plaintiffs argue that the company used the copyrighted lyrics and music of their songs without permission in various stages of developing and training its ‘cloud’ AI models.
The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic made copyright infringement part of its business practices. The plaintiffs claim that the songs were stored in a central digital repository, from which various parts of the content were copied and used to train the next generation of Cloud models, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The plaintiffs also allege that Cloud sometimes serves up content that is too similar to the original songs when users request a new version of a particular song. According to them, this problem has persisted despite the introduction of security restrictions by the company. However, all of these claims are based on the plaintiffs’ position in the lawsuit and have yet to be tested in court.
The rights holders are seeking a maximum of $150,000 in statutory damages for each allegedly infringed song. This amount comes to about $41.1 million for 274 songs. They have also asked the court to issue a permanent injunction and order the company to destroy unauthorized copies.
Richard Bush, the lawyer leading the case, has previously represented Marvin Gaye’s family in the “Blurred Lines” copyright lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. Bush says his clients are the guardians of the historical and cultural legacy of Elvis Presley’s songs.
The case is part of a broader legal battle between the music industry and artificial intelligence companies over copyright. In 2023, Universal Music, Concord Music Group and ABKCO also filed a lawsuit against Anthropic for using song lyrics, with additional claims later added. Other entities, including BMG Rights Management, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, have also taken similar actions against AI companies. At least half a dozen other cases related to the issue are reportedly pending in federal court in San Francisco.
Anthropic has previously argued that training AI models on copyrighted material could, in some circumstances, fall under “fair use” under U.S. law. The company also had to pay $1.5 billion last year to settle a separate lawsuit brought by authors who alleged that their books were illegally copied to train AI models.
The case involving Elvis Presley’s songs is still in its early stages. The court has yet to decide whether Anthropic actually infringed copyright.