Authentic Brands Group, which manages the rights to Elvis Presley's creative legacy, has filed a lawsuit against AI developer Anthropic, seeking about $41 million over the unauthorized use of 274 songs by the legendary musician, infohub.kz reports.
According to the plaintiffs, the makers of the neural network used the singer's classic hits, including Can't Help Falling in Love, All Shook Up and A Little Less Conversation, to train their Claude language models without permission. They are seeking the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each infringed work.
The complaint alleges that the developers effectively built their business model on large-scale copyright infringement. It separately stresses that the safeguards the company put in place failed, and that the neural network continues to reproduce lyrics and generate derivative material based on the musician's compositions.
Anthropic representatives denied the allegations and said they intend to defend their position in court. The company has previously insisted that training neural networks on publicly available material falls under the concept of fair use. The outcome of the case could set an important precedent for the entire artificial intelligence and music industries.