Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up,” “Return to Sender” and other hits are at the center of a new legal fight involving San Francisco artificial intelligence company Anthropic.
The owners of rights to hundreds of songs made famous by Presley have sued Anthropic, alleging it used the copyrighted works without permission to train its Claude models.
The lawsuit, filed Friday, Oct 23, in federal court in San Jose, accuses Anthropic of infringing copyrights in 274 musical compositions, including “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Don’t Be Cruel” and “A Little Less Conversation.”
The plaintiffs include Authentic Brands Group, Raleigh Music Publishing, Abilene Music and several trusts and individuals that say they own or control rights to the compositions. They are seeking at least US$41.1mil (RM166mil) in statutory copyright damages, along with additional damages under federal laws governing technological protections and copyright information.
The combined damages sought could reach about US$48.6mil (RM197mil).
Anthropic disputes the allegations.
“We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully,” a company spokesperson said in a statement Monday, Oct 26.
The case adds another high-profile music copyright dispute to the growing legal fight over how AI companies obtain and use copyrighted material to develop their models.
Anthropic has faced lawsuits from music publishers over similar allegations, while other AI companies have been sued by record labels and music rights holders.
The Presley rights holders say Anthropic collected copyrighted lyrics from across the internet and from large datasets used to train Claude.
The complaint specifically points to datasets including Common Crawl and The Pile, as well as the Internet Archive, and claims that Presley lyrics were included in those collections without authorisation.
The plaintiffs also contend Anthropic maintained a permanent internal repository containing copyrighted material that could be used for future training and other purposes.
The complaint argues that the copying occurred at multiple stages of Anthropic's development process, including when material was acquired, cleaned, stored and incorporated into successive Claude models.
The plaintiffs further accuse Anthropic of stripping copyright management information from the material, including song titles, songwriter and composer credits, publisher information and copyright notices.
In addition, the lawsuit focuses on what Claude allegedly produces when users ask it to reproduce or rewrite copyrighted songs.
The plaintiffs say Claude has generated lyrics from songs in their catalogue and created derivative works based on them. They allege that Anthropic added filters after earlier copyright lawsuits but that those safeguards can be circumvented through changes to the wording of a user’s request.
The complaint specifically cites an interaction in which Claude allegedly created versions of songs for a “modern audience.”
According to the plaintiffs, the resulting works retained elements including the original songs’ structures, hooks and verse, chorus and bridge arrangements, while changing some of the wording.
The Presley case comes as music publishers and other copyright owners increasingly challenge the use of their works to train generative AI systems.
Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and other music companies have sued Anthropic over allegations involving copyrighted lyrics.
Anthropic has been involved in litigation over its use of copyrighted books, too. Last year, the company agreed to a US$1.5bil (RM6bil) settlement with a group of authors who accused it of using pirated books to train its models.
The lawsuit comes just one day after Anthropic filed paperwork for a proposed initial public offering.
The lawsuit asks a judge to prohibit further infringement and to order Anthropic to destroy or impound unauthorised copies of the works, including copies allegedly retained in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights and server infrastructure. – San Francisco Chronicle/Tribune News Service
