Rightsholders behind Elvis Presley hits sue Anthropic for $48.6M over song lyrics
Owners of songs recorded by Elvis Presley are suing Anthropic for more than $48.6 million, alleging Claude trained on unlicensed lyrics and stripped songwriter credits.
Rightsholders behind songs made famous by Elvis Presley have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic, seeking more than $48.6 million in damages. The complaint claims the artificial intelligence developer copied the lyrics of 274 songs recorded by Presley to train its AI models, including its chatbot Claude, without securing licenses or paying rights owners.
According to the lawsuit, Anthropic scraped protected lyrics and stripped out songwriter credits during the process. The plaintiffs further allege that Claude can reproduce copies of those protected lyrics in its outputs, directly infringing on the catalog owners' rights.
The case represents an escalating legal front for music publishers and rightsholders against generative AI platforms. The outcome could set important legal precedents regarding whether scraping song lyrics for model training constitutes copyright infringement and whether stripping metadata violates copyright protections.
Source: Music Business Worldwide
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