Log in Sign up
Business Huixi Raised 1.7 Billion Yuan for Robot Chips. Its Best Argument Is 17,625 Consecutive Tasks at 99.99 Percent Coding Assistants A Chinese Recruiting Company's Lab Put a 33B Open Model on Hugging Face. It Claims Wins on 7 of 8 Coding Tests, All Self-Reported Claude Elvis Presley's Rights Holders Want $48.6 Million From Anthropic: $41.1 Million for 274 Songs, $7.5 Million for the Credits Opinion Anthropic Co-Founder Jack Clark Now Says Recursive Self-Improvement Could Begin as Early as 2027 Meta Meta Built a 120-Task Test for Glasses Assistants Where the Only Passing Grade Is the State of the Room Security Johns Hopkins Bayview Told 3,182 Patients Their Records Went Into an Unapproved AI Tool News Nvidia Open-Sources Flora, a Robot Video Labeler That Costs 72 Cents an Hour Instead of 88 Dollars News 51Sim Becomes the Only Chinese Company on NVIDIA's Halos SAFE List, and Its Parent's Stock Jumped 30 Percent in a Day Business Huixi Raised 1.7 Billion Yuan for Robot Chips. Its Best Argument Is 17,625 Consecutive Tasks at 99.99 Percent Coding Assistants A Chinese Recruiting Company's Lab Put a 33B Open Model on Hugging Face. It Claims Wins on 7 of 8 Coding Tests, All Self-Reported Claude Elvis Presley's Rights Holders Want $48.6 Million From Anthropic: $41.1 Million for 274 Songs, $7.5 Million for the Credits Opinion Anthropic Co-Founder Jack Clark Now Says Recursive Self-Improvement Could Begin as Early as 2027 Meta Meta Built a 120-Task Test for Glasses Assistants Where the Only Passing Grade Is the State of the Room Security Johns Hopkins Bayview Told 3,182 Patients Their Records Went Into an Unapproved AI Tool News Nvidia Open-Sources Flora, a Robot Video Labeler That Costs 72 Cents an Hour Instead of 88 Dollars News 51Sim Becomes the Only Chinese Company on NVIDIA's Halos SAFE List, and Its Parent's Stock Jumped 30 Percent in a Day

Elvis Presley's Rights Holders Want $48.6 Million From Anthropic: $41.1 Million for 274 Songs, $7.5 Million for the Credits

Claude · By: AIReport Admin · 1 hour ago · 👁 9
Elvis Presley's Rights Holders Want $48.6 Million From Anthropic: $41.1 Million for 274 Songs, $7.5 Million for the Credits

Authentic Brands Group and co-plaintiffs sued Anthropic on October 23 in the Northern District of California, alleging Claude was trained on 274 Elvis Presley compositions without a licence. They seek the statutory maximum of $150,000 per work, about $41.1 million, then add claims for removing copyright management information and circumventing protection measures that take the total to $48.6 million. Anthropic has not yet responded to the complaint.

Authentic Brands Group, the licensing company that controls Elvis Presley's name, image and music rights, sued Anthropic on Friday in the Northern District of California, alleging that the company trained Claude on 274 Presley compositions without a licence. The case, ABG EPE IP LLC v. Anthropic, is numbered 5:26-cv-12473 and was first reported by Billboard.

The complaint is about lyrics and compositions, not recordings. Claude does not generate audio, so the plaintiffs argue that the harm sits in text: lyrics copied into training data that can still be reproduced when asked. The works named include Can't Help Falling in Love, All Shook Up, Don't Be Cruel, Return to Sender, (You're the) Devil in Disguise and A Little Less Conversation.

The damages request is where the filing gets unusual. The plaintiffs ask for the statutory maximum of $150,000 per work for wilful infringement, which across 274 songs comes to $41.1 million. They then add two counts that most training-data suits do not bother with: removal or alteration of copyright management information at up to $25,000 per violation, or $6.85 million, and circumvention of protection measures at up to $2,500 per violation, or $685,000. At those ceilings the three claims total $48,635,000. The complaint also asks for a permanent injunction covering the 274 works, an order on the copies Anthropic holds, and a jury trial, with actual damages and profits pleaded as an alternative.

The mechanism it describes is specific. Publishers license lyrics to services such as Musixmatch and LyricFind, which are required to display songwriter, publisher and other copyright management information alongside the text. The complaint alleges that Common Crawl picked those pages up, that Anthropic copied the lyrics into an internal training library, and that its data-cleaning pipeline stripped the credits before the text went into successive Claude models. The models named in the filing include Claude Opus 5, Sonnet 5, Fable 5, Mythos 5, Haiku 4.5 and Claude 3 Opus.

On guardrails, the filing argues that the filters Anthropic added after earlier suits cover only a narrow set of prominent songs. It quotes a session in which Claude was asked to recreate specific songs "for a modern audience" and described its own output as keeping "same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges". The plaintiffs also cite the record in Bartz v. Anthropic, the authors' case, to argue that lyric-bearing books in the training set came from the pirate library Library Genesis.

This is not Anthropic's first music case. It is at least the sixth filed against the company in the same district: Concord and a group of publishers sued in October 2023 over 499 works, a second Concord complaint in January 2026 covers more than 20,000 works and seeks over $3 billion, and Universal, Warner and others have filed separately. What is different here is the plaintiff. Previous suits came from labels, publishers and the RIAA. This one comes from a single artist's estate and the company that owns his likeness, a cheaper and more sympathetic vehicle for testing the same legal theory.

Lead counsel Richard Busch, who represented Marvin Gaye's estate in the Blurred Lines case, framed it that way in the complaint: Anthropic "has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before." Anthropic had not filed a response as of Monday and did not comment on the case.

The arithmetic is the part worth reading twice. Statutory damages run per work, so a catalogue of 274 songs can generate a claim far larger than the licence for that catalogue would ever have cost. And if the copyright management information count survives a motion to dismiss, every model builder that scraped lyric sites and normalised the text inherits a second theory of liability that does not require proving any output was substantially similar to any song. That claim is worth $6.85 million here. Across the industry's training corpora, it is worth considerably more.

Comments (0)

Log in to join the discussion

Log In

No comments yet