Anthropic Sued by Elvis Presley Rights Holders Over 274 Copyrighted Songs

A unit of Authentic Brands Group and other Elvis Presley rights holders filed a lawsuit against Anthropic on Friday, accusing the AI developer of infringing 274 of the late artist's copyrighted songs to train its models without permission. The complaint, first reported by Billboard, alleges that Anthropic ingested the musical works en masse to build technology that outputs unlicensed derivative works, citing tracks such as "Can't Help Falling in Love," "A Little Less Conversation," "Don't Be Cruel," and "All Shook Up." The plaintiffs are represented by lead attorney Richard Busch, who previously represented Marvin Gaye's estate in the copyright infringement verdict over "Blurred Lines" and Eminem in 2000s digital download litigation. Anthropic and other AI firms maintain that training models on existing works is protected under copyright's fair use doctrine, an unresolved legal defense across dozens of pending lawsuits with billions of dollars in potential damages at stake. "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." — Richard Busch, Lead Attorney