By Gary Symons
TLL Editor-in-Chief
The AI company Anthropic is “All Shook Up” after being sued by the rights holders of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll.
The late Elvis Presley’s rights holders, including primary brand owner Authentic Brands Group, sued Anthropic in federal court on Oct. 23. The lawsuit comes at a critical time for Anthropic, as the company is preparing for an Initial Public Offering (IPO), with a valuation of $1.5 trillion.
The plaintiffs allege the AI developer trained its Claude assistant on 274 copyrighted songs without permission or payment. Those songs include some of the biggest hits in rock history, including “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” “A Little Less Conversation,” “Return to Sender” and 269 others.
They also allege that, because Claude was trained on those songs, it can be used to generate lyrics or music that either reproduces them exactly or produces new songs that are very similar.
This suit is just the latest in a long series of lawsuits involving still images, video and film, nonfiction and fiction books, news content, and music.
The underlying issue is that AI models are typically trained on massive volumes of content so they can learn the patterns, structure and language behind human-created works, and use that knowledge to create similar works.
Some previous lawsuits have ended with AI companies paying to settle claims over their use of those works. But according to the plaintiffs, Anthropic fed Presley’s songs into Claude without a license and without first getting permission from the rights holders. As a result, the suit alleges, any outputs from Claude based on Presley’s works would be unlicensed, derivative creations.
The Cost of Licensing for AI Training
In general, statutory copyright damages in the United States can reach $150,000 for each work. Not surprisingly, the complaint seeks up to $150,000 in damages for each song, which would total $41.1 million. However, one story from the Los Angeles Times said the plaintiffs are actually seeking up to $50 million, and the difference between those two amounts is believed to be due to expected legal fees.
The plaintiffs are also asking for an injunction against further copyright infringement and the destruction of any unauthorized copies of the works.
Anthropic disputes the allegations, taking the position that using copyrighted material during model training may qualify as fair use under U.S. copyright law. No single ruling has settled that question across the industry, and multiple AI companies have put forth the argument in previous cases.
The Elvis Presley lawsuit is one of several launched in recent years as AI companies have developed platforms that allow users to create music, text, video and images. Music publishers and major labels are among the most active in their legal actions, filing multiple suits over similar allegations of unauthorized use of copyrighted material for training purposes.
Why The Presley Case Could Set a New Precedent
The largest settlement to date also involved a lawsuit against Anthropic. In Bartz v. Anthropic, the AI company agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle claims that it downloaded millions of pirated books to train its large language models (LLMs). Attorneys and legal experts said the settlement is the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history, even though the judge threw out one important aspect of the plaintiffs’ case.
The plaintiffs essentially accused Anthropic of building an internal library of works taken from the piracy sites Library Genesis (LibGen) and PiLiMi, and then using those texts to train its AI systems without permission from the authors and rights holders.
The case ended with a settlement in which Anthropic agreed to pay $3,000 for each allegedly pirated work. At least 500,000 published works were involved, and if the number is found to be higher, Anthropic would also have to pay $3,000 for each additional work.
However, the judge in that case ruled that using legally obtained books to train AI might qualify as fair use, but that legal principle was not fully adjudicated in the Bartz case.
The Elvis Presley lawsuit similarly argues that Anthropic violated copyright and that its use of the songs is not covered by the fair-use doctrine.
Should the Presley rights holders win, it could set a precedent that would massively increase the legal liability for AI companies that use human-created works to train their models. For example, a ruling against Anthropic on the fair-use question could pressure AI developers to license music catalogs before training their LLMs. On the other hand, a ruling in Anthropic’s favor could strengthen fair-use arguments.
Either outcome would carry major consequences for songwriters, publishers, artists and AI developers.
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