Companies and family trusts that hold the copyrights to 274 songs made famous by "King of Rock and Roll" Elvis Presley sued Anthropic on Friday, accusing the Claude maker of using the songs' lyrics to train its AI models without ever asking for a license.
It's the second time this week Anthropic has been sued over song lyrics in federal court in Northern California. On Wednesday, Reservoir Media, which holds the rights to hit songs by Madonna and Joni Mitchell, among many others, filed a similar suit in the same district over 853 of its compositions. Richard Busch, a Nashville lawyer with Adams & Reese, represents the plaintiffs in both cases, and much of the language in the two filings is identical.
The lead plaintiff, ABG EPE IP LLC, took over the Elvis Presley trademark from Elvis Presley Enterprises in 2013, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records show. Its trademark filings are handled by Authentic Brands Group, which shares its Manhattan address. Raleigh Music Publishing, Abilene Music and trusts tied to the Creatore and Aberbach families joined the suit, which names classic Elvis songs including "All Shook Up," "Can't Help Falling in Love," "Don't Be Cruel" and "Return to Sender."
Under copyright law, willful infringement can mean penalties of up to $150,000 per work. For 274 songs, that totals to the $41.1 million the Elvis plaintiffs are asking for. The Elvis plaintiffs also want another $7.5 million or so on two Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims, accusing Anthropic of bypassing access controls on licensed lyric sites and stripping out songwriter credits.
"We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully," an Anthropic spokesperson told The Latent.
Plaintiffs say guardrails fall short
The lawsuits claim that Anthropic got lyrics to protected songs from datasets that scraped the web, such as Common Crawl and The Pile, and that the AI firm kept copies of the lyrics in an internal library. Before the text was used by Anthropic for training, the firm allegedly scrubbed out the song titles, writer names and publisher credits as part of its data-cleaning process.
The lawsuits also take aim at Claude's outputs. Claude generally refuse to reproduce lyrics in full due to Anthropic putting lyric filters in place after music publishers first sued it in October 2023. However, the lawsuits claim, those filters cover only a small number of hits and Claude can bypass the filters when the user rewords the prompt.
"In one of its latest iterations, Claude continues to infringe," the lawsuit claims. "When recently asked to recreate specific songs 'for a modern audience,' Claude did so and admitted: 'These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges. That’s edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out.”
Reservoir owns songs including Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach" and Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life." It wants roughly $151.4 million across the same three claims. It also sued AI music model trainer and app Suno the same day, over 1,050 songs, Music Business Worldwide reported.
Music suits pile up for Anthropic
The lawsuit from the Elvis rights holders adds to at least six other music-composition copyright cases that are now pending against Anthropic in the Northern District of California alone. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord and ABKCO filed the first such suit in 2023, with Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music following suit in August of this year.
Like the Sony and Warner suit, the recent suits ask a judge to order Anthropic to destroy unauthorized copies of their songs, including "copies retained in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure." The rights owners also want Anthropic to provide a full accounting of all "training data, scraping activities, and datasets" which involve the copyrighted works.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Latent. The company has defended its training in past cases as fair use, an argument that partly held up in Bartz v. Anthropic. There, a federal judge ruled that training Claude on books Anthropic bought legally constituted fair use, but keeping millions of pirated copies of those books was not. Anthropic later agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle.
Anthropic is expected to go public in November. Its draft prospectus showed an $80.7 billion loss for the first half of the year, The Latent reported Wednesday, citing The Wall Street Journal.