Anthropic sued for allegedly stealing from The King

According to Rolling Stone, in the filing Authentic Brands Group, owners of Presley’s music and other aspects of the legendary singer’s image, claim, “Claude’ has created infringing output of copyrighted material of virtually every song from every catalog available on the internet, including the Works. Even after the Defendant supposedly put up ‘guardrails’ after being sued, in one of its latest iterations, Claude continues to infringe: when recently asked to recreate specific songs ‘for a modern audience,’ Claude did so and admitted: ‘These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges.'”

Now, a company that bought the intellectual property of a dead artist suing a company plundering that property to create soulless nonsense music might provoke some tangled feelings, but AI’s habit of illegally scraping millions of copyrighted songs has become a whole new legal frontier. And even if Authentic Brands Group’s claim that Anthropic’s latest example of unequivocal and massive rights violation is only worth $150,000 per infringed Elvis song ($41.5 million bucks or so won’t do much to deter copyright-steamrolling mega-corp Anthropic), the suit is yet another instance of us puny humans vainly attempting to assert control over our hard creative work.