Elvis Presley Songholders Sue Anthropic for Up to $41.1 Million

The rights holders of 274 songs from Elvis Presley's repertoire have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the federal court of the Northern District of California. The document was submitted to the court on October 23. The plaintiffs are seeking up to $41.1 million for the unauthorized use of works in training the Claude AI models.

Among the claimants are ABG EPE IP LLC, a division of Authentic Brands Group, which owns the rights to the singer's name and image, as well as music publishers and trusts controlling the rights to his works. The claims include songs such as Can’t Help Falling in Love, All Shook Up, Don’t Be Cruel, A Little Less Conversation, and Return to Sender.

The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic collected copyrighted texts from the internet without permission, stored them in internal databases, and used them in training subsequent versions of Claude. According to their version, the materials were obtained through automated data collection from websites and large text datasets, including Common Crawl and The Pile. Specifically, the claimants pointed to the YouTube subtitles dataset included in The Pile, where, according to their data, texts of several Presley songs were present. In a lawsuit from book authors, Anthropic admitted that at least one commercial version of Claude was trained on YouTube subtitles from a public dataset that the company considers a version of The Pile.

In the plaintiffs' opinion, the violations were not limited to model training: Claude, they claim, reproduces protected texts and creates derivative works based on them. After the first lawsuit from music publishers in 2023, Anthropic implemented filters against reproducing song lyrics; however, according to the document, they cover only a narrow range of popular compositions, and can be bypassed by altering the wording of the request.

As an example, the rights holders cited Claude Sonnet 5's response to a request to rewrite famous songs "for a modern audience": the model indicated that the resulting versions were too close to the originals – the same structure and memorable phrases, only slightly rephrased. This example is taken from another lawsuit – Round Hill Music against Anthropic – and concerns songs by Goo Goo Dolls, James Brown, and Bonnie Tyler, not Presley. The plaintiffs expect to obtain evidence of violations for all 274 works during the discovery process.

The claimants also accused Anthropic of removing authorship information when preparing training data: according to their version, the company excluded composers' names, titles of works, and information about rights holders, making it difficult to determine the origin of the texts. For the alleged willful copyright infringement, the plaintiffs are seeking up to $150,000 for each work – totaling $41.1 million. They also hope to receive up to $7.54 million for the alleged circumvention of technical protection measures and removal of authorship information. The rights holders are also seeking a ban on further use of the works without permission, disclosure of information about the training data, and destruction of illegal copies, including in model weights.