The owners of Elvis Presley’s music have sued the AI company Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, alleging it used 274 of the king’s songs to train its models without permission.

The lawsuit was filed Friday, October 23, in federal court by a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group, which controls Presley’s name, image, and likeness, along with other companies that hold rights to his music. 

The complaint alleges that Anthropic used copyrighted compositions and lyrics to train Claude without licensing them, and that the model can generate unauthorized versions of existing songs. According to the suit, Claude has produced infringing output of virtually every song from every catalog available online, including the Presley songs at issue. The works named include “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “A Little Less Conversation,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” “Return to Sender,” and “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise.”  

The plaintiffs are seeking about $41m, which reflects the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work for willful infringement under US copyright law, multiplied across the 274 songs. Lead attorney Richard Busch said the plaintiffs are “deeply protective of these iconic songs,” and alleged that Anthropic built its business model on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before. 

Anthropic has not publicly responded to the suit, and has previously maintained that training AI models on copyrighted material can be protected under the United States Fair Use laws. 

Busch, of the firm Adams & Reese, is known for his work on the “Blurred Lines” case for the Marvin Gaye estate and for representing Salt-N-Pepa in their termination-rights dispute with Universal Music Group (UMG). He also filed the music publisher Reservoir’s lawsuits against Anthropic and the AI music company Suno on October 21, two days before the Presley suit. Reservoir’s complaint against Anthropic, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Claude was trained on the lyrics of its compositions, and seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, which the complaint puts at $127.95m for those songs. 

The Presley suit is the latest in a wave of legal actions from music rights holders. In October 2023, Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and and ABKCO sued Anthropic, alleging that Claude reproduced copyrighted lyrics without authorization, and BMG has also sued over lyrics from artists including Justin Bieber, Bruno Mars, and the Rolling Stones. In the 2023 case, a federal judge in San Jose reportedly heard arguments on October 21 over whether training Claude on song lyrics qualifies as fair use, and had not yet been used.  

Music rights holders have also gone after the companies that deliver music to streaming services. On September 15, UMG and its Capitol Records and Capitol Christian Music Group sued the distributor DistroKid in the US District Court for the District of Delaware, alleging deceptive trade practices and copyright infringement and accusing DistroKid of flooring streaming platforms with AI-generated tracks. UMG is seeking maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per infringed work.