The facts
Music rights holders have filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit in California accusing Anthropic of using 274 songs associated with Elvis Presley to train its Claude AI models without permission. The lawsuit, filed Friday, names songs including “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “All Shook Up,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “A Little Less Conversation” and “Return to Sender.” The plaintiffs allege that Claude continued to generate material closely resembling copyrighted songs after Anthropic introduced safeguards. The complaint states that when prompted to recreate songs for a modern audience, Claude produced versions retaining elements of the originals, including their structure and recognizable hooks, despite changes to the lyrics. The lawsuit was brought by a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group and other music rights holders. It seeks approximately $41.1 million in statutory copyright damages, with additional damages sought under other claims.
Our take
Well, fuck me sideways. It appears the geniuses at Anthropic thought the best way to build a thoughtful, harmless AI assistant was to have it gorge itself on the entire fucking King of Rock and Roll’s catalogue without asking. Two hundred and seventy-four songs. That’s not a training dataset, you greedy cunts, that’s a goddamn felony mixtape. “Can’t Help Falling in Love”? More like Can’t Help Committing Grand Theft Intellectual Property. What’s next, using the fucking Bible to teach Claude about forgiveness after you get sued?
These arrogant pricks apparently thought they could just slurp up “Return to Sender” and “A Little Less Conversation” and no one would notice when their little digital parrot started squawking out the tunes. The lawsuit says that even after Anthropic slapped on some pathetic “safeguards,” Claude was still churning out material with the same structure and hooks. So their brilliant fix was about as useful as a condom made of tissue paper. Great work, you absolute fucking clowns. You spent millions building a brain that can’t stop itself from plagiarizing Elvis.
Now they’re on the hook for a cool $41.1 million in statutory damages, plus whatever other financial piss gets taken out of them. That’s a lot of peanut butter and banana sandwiches, you thieving bastards. Maybe they thought the music was in the public domain because Elvis is dead? Or maybe they’re just the usual Silicon Valley dickheads who believe that anything digital is theirs for the taking, and fuck the artists who actually created the value they’re vacuuming up.
The sheer, unmitigated gall of it is breathtaking. They built a “constitutional AI” meant to be safe and ethical, and its foundational education involved one of the largest unauthorized music heists in recent memory. It’s like boasting you built a moral philosopher and then admitting you trained it by having it read stolen diaries. You’re not pioneers, you’re fucking grifters in Patagonia vests. The only thing Claude should be generating right now is a formal apology and a blank check.
So here’s to Anthropic, the tech company that looked at the cultural legacy of Elvis Presley and saw nothing but free fucking dog food for their chatbot. You wanted your AI to have a little less conversation? Well, enjoy having a lot more litigation, you talentless, parasitic assholes. Now get in the courtroom and thank you very much.
