Why are Elvis Presley rightsholders suing AI company Anthropic?

Anthropic could face more than $40million in damages over the alleged unauthorised use of Elvis’ music catalogue.

Anthopic, the company behind AI assistant Claude, is being sued by Elvis Presley rightsholders over alleged copyright infringement of 274 of the King’s songs.

They have launched legal action against AI company, accusing it of using Elvis’ songs to train its models without permission.

The lawsuit was filed on Friday (23 October) in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group, the company that controls much of Presley’s intellectual property and trademark rights.

The suit states 274 songs, including ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’, and ‘A Little Less Conversation’, were copied without permission and used to train Anthropic’s Claude AI models.

The plaintiffs have claimed that Anthropic infringed their copyrights without a licence or payment, and the company retained copies in an internal library for training future versions of its models – all without obtaining permission or paying the relevant rights.

Anthropic could face more than $40million (approx. €36m) in damages.

“The Elvis Plaintiffs’ iconic collective catalog contains some of the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history,” the lawsuit reads.

“The Elvis Plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before,” lead attorney Richard Busch wrote in a statement “The Elvis Plaintiffs are deeply protective of these iconic songs.”

Anthropic told NBC News that they “disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully”. The company has previously maintained that training AI models on copyrighted material can be protected under US fair use law.

In October 2023, Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO sued Anthropic, alleging that Claude had reproduced copyrighted lyrics without authorisation.

This year, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell also filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the company of using copyrighted lyrics and sheet music from artists including The Beatles and Michael Jackson to train Claude.

Anthropic has also faced a lawsuit from authors who accused it of using pirated books to train Claude. The company agreed to a $1.5bn settlement in July.

Last month, the company told would-be shareholders that the technology it sells could threaten humanity itself. Anthropic listed risk factors including the possibility that increasingly advanced AI models could manipulate, blackmail or behave in other unpredictable ways. Anthropic’s own research has shown autonomous models sabotaging code, assisting fraud and manipulating information in controlled tests.

Source: www.euronews.com