Anthropic faces lawsuit over alleged use of Elvis Presley songs

The complaint alleges infringement of copyrights in 274 musical compositions, including “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Don’t Be Cruel” and “A Little Less Conversation.”[1] The plaintiffs say Anthropic collected copyrighted lyrics from across the internet and from large datasets used to train Claude.[1] They identify Common Crawl, The Pile and the Internet Archive as collections that allegedly contained Presley lyrics without authorization.[1] The complaint also refers to material being acquired, cleaned, stored and incorporated into successive Claude models.[1] These are allegations in the complaint, not findings stated in the evidence.

The plaintiffs seek at least US$41.1 million in statutory copyright damages and say the combined damages they seek could reach about US$48.6 million.[1] They also request additional damages under federal laws governing technological protections and copyright information.[1] Their requested court order would prohibit further infringement and require unauthorized copies to be destroyed or impounded.[1] The proposed order would extend to alleged copies in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights and server infrastructure.[1] Anthropic said it disagrees with the claims and intends to defend the case fully.[1]

The plaintiffs allege Claude has generated lyrics from songs in their catalog and created derivative works based on them.[1] They say safeguards against those outputs can be circumvented by changing the wording of a user’s request.[1] The complaint cites an interaction in which Claude allegedly produced song versions for a “modern audience.”[1] According to the plaintiffs, those versions retained elements of the original songs’ structure, hooks and verse, chorus and bridge arrangements while changing some wording.[1] The evidence describes these points as allegations; it does not state that a court has determined whether the outputs infringe copyright.

The lawsuit adds to broader legal challenges over how AI companies obtain and use copyrighted material to develop models.[1] Anthropic has faced lawsuits from music publishers over similar allegations, while record labels and music rights holders have sued other AI companies.[1] Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and other music companies have sued Anthropic over allegations involving copyrighted lyrics.[1] Anthropic has also been involved in litigation concerning its use of copyrighted books and agreed last year to a US$1.5 billion settlement with authors who accused it of training on pirated books.[1] The lawsuit came one day after Anthropic filed paperwork for a proposed initial public offering.[1]