Authentic Brands Group, the owner of Elvis Presley's music catalogue is suing Anthropic for using 274 songs by the rock music icon to train their AI models without gaining permission from them, as per reports on Monday.
The licensing group that also owns his likeness and music, filed the lawsuit against the AI company for alleged copyright infringement on Friday, as per a Billboard report.
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"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,” the lawsuit, written by lead attorney Richard Busch read.
"From its inception, Anthropic's AI model, ‘Claude,' has created infringing output of copyrighted material of virtually every song from every catalog available on the internet," it added.
The claimant is seeking $41 million in total from the AI firm, with the copyright infringement penalty for each track being $150,000. Elvis's catalogue includes famous and acclaimed songs such as 'Can't Help Falling in Love', 'All Shook Up' and 'A Little Less Conversation'.
“Even Anthropic's institution of guardrails (albeit ineffectively) to purportedly limit outputs which infringe upon music copyrights, after being caught, along with its knowledge that its guardrails were ineffective to stop creating outputs which infringed music copyrights, demonstrates that Anthropic knowingly engaged and continues to willfully engage in copyright infringement of others' musical works,” the lawsuit said.
This is one of the first instances where an AI company has been subject to lawsuits by a musical artists' estate. In previous cases, record labels such as Sony, Universal and Warner Records as well as The Recording Industry Association of America (the US's main trade organisation for recording artists), had taken legal action against AI firms for copyright infringement.
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Authentic Brands Group's lawsuit sets a wider precedent for how AI companies can use licensed music from catalogues.
Prominent names in the music industry have expressed opposition and concern regarding the unauthorised use of their music by AI companies. With over 200 musicians signing an open letter. Signatories included artists such as Billie Eilish, Katy Perry, Kim Petras, R.E.M and Metro Boomin. The estates of artists such as Frank Sinatra, Bob Marley as well as historically significant artists such as Stevie Wonder also signed the letter.
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