Elvis Presley's catalog owners sue Anthropic over 274 songs

What the lawsuit says

The owners of Elvis Presley's music catalog have sued Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI assistant. The plaintiff is Authentic Brands Group, which holds licensing rights to his music and likeness. As technews.tw reported, citing The Guardian, the suit was filed on the 23rd and was first revealed by Billboard.

It claims Anthropic infringed the copyright on 274 Elvis songs by using them to train its models. Training means feeding a model huge amounts of material so it learns patterns it can later reproduce.

The claims about Claude's output

The complaint goes beyond training. It says Claude has produced content that infringes copyright for almost every song in the catalogs available online.

It also says Anthropic added safeguards after being called out, but knew they would not reliably stop infringing output. The plaintiffs use that to argue the infringement was knowing and deliberate. These are the plaintiffs' arguments, not findings.

Why this case stands out

AI companies already face copyright complaints from the Recording Industry Association of America and from Sony, Universal and Warner Records. This case is described as one of the first major challenges brought against an AI developer directly by an artist's estate.

The outcome could set a wider precedent for how AI companies get permission to use existing music catalogs. Musicians have also worried that AI-made, low-quality tracks could crowd out human songwriters. Spotify said last week it had removed tens of millions of songs it considered AI junk from its recommendations.