A group of companies and trusts overseeing Elvis Presley's music is suing Anthropic, alleging it trained its AI, Claude, on music the legendary musician created.
Authentic Brands filed the lawsuit against Anthropic on Friday, Oct. 23, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit targets AI music generation, claiming Claude copies music Authentic Brands licenses and, in doing so, Anthropic is committing copyright infringement.
"Put another way, defendant Anthropic has essentially put to the test the adage of whether monkeys and typewriters could, provided enough time, recreate 'Hamlet,'" Authentic Brands' attorneys wrote in the lawsuit, obtained by The Commercial Appeal, part of USA TODAY Network. "Rather than
training its monkeys (the AI models) from first principles, Anthropic found mimicry (i.e., copyright infringement) to be the much easier pursuit."
"We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully," an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement to The Commercial Appeal on Oct. 26.
Authentic Brands alleged Anthropic has not paid any royalties or requested any licenses to train its AI. Instead, the music company claims Anthropic used "automated scraping tools" to scour the internet for content to train its AI on and claims Anthropic has done so "throughout the entire development of its Claude models."
"The Elvis plaintiffs rely on U.S. copyright law to protect their works from infringement," Authentic Brands wrote in the lawsuit. "Without such protections, the music publishing industry would not function because songwriters, artists, and their heirs would not receive the full benefit from exploitation of musical works. Indeed, many of the heirs of the original writers rely on the revenue generated by the works."
Media companies have sued AI companies for copyright infringement for years now, seeking to prevent AI models from using their content to train future models. Companies like The New York Times and Disney have sued OpenAI and Midjourney.
In July of this year, Anthropic settled a lawsuit with authors for $1.5 billion over allegations that the company used copyrighted books to train Claude. That case was also litigated in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Authentic Brands is not the only music group suing Anthropic in California's Northern District. Days earlier, on Oct. 21, Reservoir Media Management — which owns licensing rights to songs from Johnny Cash, Madonna, and Joni Mitchell — sued Anthropic for $149.3 million and filed a separate lawsuit against Suno, an AI music generation platform.
The Reservoir lawsuit includes many of the same allegations as the Authentic Brands lawsuit, even including identical language at times.
According to Authentic Brands' lawsuit, Anthropic went to great lengths to delete "metadata and identifying information" on the songs.
"This deliberate preference for maximum metadata stripping is significant because Anthropic's engineers understood — or at a minimum should have understood — that the absence of CMI (Copyright Management Information) in training data would ensure that Claude could not reproduce that information when generating outputs, thereby concealing the provenance of copyrighted material embedded in those outputs and making infringement harder for rights holders to detect," Authentic Brands alleged.
When Claude has learned from the songs it was fed, Authentic Brands claimed it would go on to produce "unauthorized copies of, and derivative works based upon" the original, copyrighted music.
The lawsuit argues that fair use does not apply because Anthropic stores the music indefinitely.
"Building and maintaining a permanent stockpile of copyrighted material for open-ended future exploitation fails every factor of the fair-use analysis: the purpose is acquisitive rather than transformative; entire works are retained without limitation; and the unauthorized copies function as market substitutes, displacing sales and licenses on a one-to-one basis," the lawsuit argued.
Authentic Brands is asking the court to find Anthropic intentionally committed copyright infringement and to order all copyrighted works be destroyed. Additionally, Authentic Brands is demanding that Anthropic pay $2,500 per licensing agreement violation and $25,000 for each instance of scrubbing copyright information from a music work.
In total, those fines could add up to $6.85 million since Authentic Brands alleges Anthropic took 274 songs.
The company also asked the court to award statutory damages of $150,000 per song taken, which it projected would total almost $41.1 million in additional damages.
Lucas Finton covers crime, policing, jails, the courts and criminal justice policy for The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached by phone or email: (901)208-3922 and Lucas.Finton@commercialappeal.com, and followed on X @LucasFinton.
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Owners of Elvis' music sue Anthropic, claim copyright infringement
