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A group of rights holders controlling Elvis Presley’s music catalog has filed a $48.6 million copyright infringement lawsuit against AI company Anthropic. The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic’s AI model Claude was trained on hundreds of Presley’s songs without permission. The case was filed Friday in the Northern District of California.
The 28-page complaint names Authentic Brands Group, Raleigh Music Publishing and several other stakeholders as plaintiffs. Together, they claim Anthropic used 274 of Presley’s songs to train Claude. The tracks include well-known titles such as “Can’t Help Falling in Love with You,” “Run On” and “Farther Along.” The plaintiffs are demanding $48.6 million in damages and want Anthropic to stop using their copyrighted material.
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Lawsuit Challenges Anthropic’s Public Image
Lead attorney Richard Busch directly challenges Anthropic’s public reputation as a company committed to benefiting humanity through AI. He points to the company’s ongoing copyright battles as evidence of a contradiction. In the complaint, Busch argues that progress in AI should not come at the expense of copyright holders.
“While in other cases for copyright infringement, Defendant has waxed poetic about the necessity of progress and AI’s value to society, there is simply no reason — other than rote expediency — to have that progress come at the cost of copyright holders,” Busch wrote in the filing.
Busch also connects Anthropic’s use of Presley’s catalog to its pursuit of a potentially $2 trillion initial public offering. He argues the company exploited the music to boost its valuation. “The Works were created over periods of dozens of years, and Anthropic, by its infringing conduct, is destroying the value of these Works in a matter of a few years with only profit as its motive,” he wrote.
A Pattern of Copyright Litigation
Busch is no stranger to suing Anthropic over copyright issues. In August, he filed a separate $1 billion lawsuit against the company on behalf of Round Hill Music. That case alleged Anthropic illegally scraped hundreds of songs without authorization.
Anthropic has faced a growing wave of copyright lawsuits from artists and writers. Last year, the company settled a case brought by a group of authors who accused it of misusing their books to train its AI models. That settlement reached $1.5 billion. Neither Busch nor Anthropic responded to requests for comment on the Presley lawsuit.
The Elvis Presley copyright case is part of a broader legal trend. AI companies including Suno and Udio have also faced similar litigation over how they train their models. As AI development accelerates, courts are increasingly being asked to define the boundaries between technological progress and intellectual property rights.
