Elvis Presley has been dead for nearly fifty years, and on Friday his estate sued one of the most valuable AI companies on Earth. The owners of the King's music catalogue say Anthropic trained its chatbot Claude on 274 of his songs without permission — and then kept right on singing them.
The lawsuit, filed Friday by a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group with other rights holders and first reported by Billboard, names — according to NME — some of the most famous songs ever recorded: "Can't Help Falling in Love," "All Shook Up," "Don't Be Cruel," "A Little Less Conversation," "Return to Sender," "(You're the) Devil in Disguise." The plaintiffs want the maximum $150,000 per song — about $41.1 million — plus an injunction and destruction of unauthorized copies.
The filing's sharpest claim isn't about training — it's about what Claude still does now. Even after Anthropic added guardrails against reproducing copyrighted lyrics, Claude agreed when asked to recreate specific Presley songs "for a modern audience" — and produced near-identical versions, same structure and hooks, lightly reworded. The guardrails, in other words, are the exhibit.
Lead attorney Richard Busch — who represented the Marvin Gaye estate in the "Blurred Lines" case — put it bluntly: "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."
Anthropic told NBC News it disagrees with the claims and intends to defend the case fully, leaning on its position that training on copyrighted material is protected fair use — a defense every major AI lab is now using at once.
What makes this suit different is who is bringing it. Anthropic is already facing music publishers — Universal, Concord and ABKCO sued in October 2023; Sony and Warner Chappell followed in August, citing the Beatles, Taylor Swift and Michael Jackson. Those were companies suing over catalogues. This is an artist's estate — one of the first — suing over a single, iconic voice.
Publishers argue licensing economics; an estate argues identity. The timing is pointed, too: Anthropic is reportedly heading toward an IPO, its draft S-1 leaked last week, and every new suit becomes a line item in a prospectus investors will actually read. Whether training on a song is reading it or copying it still has no final answer — but the King just joined the case.
— via NME