Authentic Brands Group Sues Anthropic Over 274 Elvis Songs, and the King Wants $48.6 Million

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, names Authentic Brands Group's ABG EPE IP LLC alongside Raleigh Music Publishing, Abilene Music, and trusts tied to the Aberbach family and Luigi Creatore as plaintiffs. The target is Anthropic, the maker of the Claude models, and the complaint reads less like a cease-and-desist and more like an itemized bill: actual damages, or statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work, which on 274 songs adds up to $41.1 million before two DMCA counts push the total past $48.6 million.

The complaint alleges Anthropic scraped Presley lyrics from lyrics sites and training sets including Common Crawl and The Pile, pulled pirated books off Library Genesis via BitTorrent, and stripped songwriter credits in the process, allegations that, if proven, would mean Claude both ingested and can reproduce copyrighted material without so much as a courtesy credit. Anthropic says it disagrees with the claims and intends to defend the case fully, which is corporate-speak for see you in court.

For a brand-licensing empire built on protecting dead celebrities' names and likenesses for a living, this is existential, not incidental. Authentic Brands Group did not spend years building out Elvis's commercial afterlife so an AI model could freelance new verses on its behalf, and the suit lands alongside a wave of similar actions, including one from Universal Music Publishing Group, suggesting the music industry has decided AI training data is the next great infringement frontier worth litigating loudly.

Source: Music Business Worldwide

Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →