$50 million on the line as Elvis Presley’s music owners accuse Anthropic of AI misuse
Elvis Presley’s music rights holders are coming after Anthropic for cash, and the figure they want raises fresh questions about AI, copyright, and creative ownership.
The companies that control rights to Elvis Presley’s music have sued AI maker Anthropic in federal court in California, alleging the company used Presley’s catalog to train its chatbot, Claude, without permission. The complaint says the training set included 274 songs from the King’s catalog, from ballads to gospel staples, and points to prompts where the model can allegedly output lyrics resembling Presley works.
According to the filing, that raises a second problem beyond unlicensed training data: the risk that the model can generate material “substantially similar” to existing compositions, which the rights holders argue would amount to unauthorized derivative works. The case was filed in the Northern District of California and cites examples pulled from the model’s responses as evidence of misuse.
- “Can’t Help Falling in Love”
- “Run On”
- “Farther Along”
AI experiments on screen
Outside the courtroom, AI’s creative limits have been a flashpoint with audiences, too. After promising an AI-driven take on Homer’s epic, Elon Musk released a seven-minute first episode, The Fall of Troy, in October, generated with Grok Imagine.
Viewers picked apart the short’s pacing, stiff performances, mismatched voices, and lack of emotional pull. One reaction on X captured the mood:
technically impressive and artistically barren
That backlash isn’t the same issue at stake in the Presley suit—one is about whether audiences connect with AI-made art, the other is a copyright fight over how AI is built—but both underscore how tangled the technology has become with creative rights and reception.
The plaintiffs, Authentic Brands Group and Raleigh Music Publishing, are seeking approximately $50 million in damages, according to the complaint.