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Sun, Oct 25, 2026Sunday, October 25, 2026 · 15 stories · 5 min read

Elvis rights holders sue Anthropic over 274 songs used by Claude

Ramit KoulFounder, Software Engineer & Innovator · Published 5:02 AM ET

Authentic Brands Group and other owners of Elvis Presley's catalog have sued Anthropic, alleging that it trained Claude on 274 Presley songs without permission and that Claude still produces close rewrites.1, 2 A second Claude story points the same way: users report that Opus 5.5 now cuts off reverse-engineering requests mid-answer, which they read as an unannounced change.3 On the model side, Block showed Dessa, a voice model trained only on human speech that runs on a laptop, and Canva launched Craft, its first in-house image model, with API access.4 Here are the 2 stories that matter most, then 13 briefs. Numbers in the text link to the references at the end.

Policy & legal

Elvis Presley's rights holders sue Anthropic over training and Claude's song rewrites

Image: rollingstone.com

Authentic Brands Group, which controls Presley's music and likeness, filed the lawsuit on Friday together with other Presley rights owners.1, 2 The suit, ABE EPE LLC v. Anthropic, says Anthropic trained its models on 274 Presley songs, including "All Shook Up" and "Can't Help Falling in Love".1 The plaintiffs are asking for $150,000 per infringed track, which comes to about $41 million.1

The complaint is also about outputs, not just training. It says that even after Anthropic added guardrails, a recent version of Claude, when asked to recreate songs "for a modern audience," produced versions that kept the original structure and hooks with light rewording.1 Lead attorney Richard Busch, who previously represented the Marvin Gaye estate in the "Blurred Lines" case, argues that these are unlicensed derivative works.1

The case adds to a growing list of music suits against Anthropic. Round Hill sued Suno and Anthropic in August, and Universal Music Publishing, Abkco, Concord and BMG sued earlier over lyrics used to train Claude.2 Anthropic had not responded to The Hollywood Reporter's request for comment.2

Why it matters for builders

The complaint targets reworded outputs as well as training data, so products that let users generate lyrics or creative text with Claude are directly involved in what the court will decide.1 Teams building in this area should check how their own filters handle requests to rewrite known songs.1

Models

Block's Dessa voice model learns from speech alone and runs on a laptop

Block's AI research lab has unveiled Dessa, a full-duplex voice model that listens while it speaks, so it can handle interruptions, laughter and shifts in tone mid-conversation.5 Block says Dessa was trained only on human speech, with no text, and that it processes audio directly instead of converting speech to text first.5, 4 According to Block, it was trained from scratch on a single Nvidia GB200 NVL72 system and runs locally on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Max chip or better.5

Block argues that today's voice AI sounds unnatural because text sits in the pipeline and drops information such as emotion.4 Its demo clips include a long talk about Christopher Nolan films and a conversation between Dessa and ChatGPT.6 Block also says the model can pick up sarcasm.6

Dessa is a research preview, and Block has not shared the model's size, benchmark results or a release date.5 Early access is limited to a small group of AI safety researchers.5 Reactions to the demos ranged from praise to warnings that voices this realistic could make phone scams harder to spot.5

Why it matters for builders: A full-duplex speech model that runs on-device would cut both cost and latency for voice agents, but for now there is no public access and no independent benchmark.4, 5 Teams shipping voice products should expect more pressure to add disclosure and anti-impersonation safeguards as voices get harder to tell from people.5

In brief

  • Policy & legal

    A Futurism retrospective traces Character.AI's safety record up to its bankruptcy filing. Character.AI filed for Chapter 11 after settling its wrongful death lawsuits, and according to bankruptcy documents reviewed by 404 Media it was losing tens of millions of dollars a month on compute while revenue peaked at $5.3 million a month.7 Futurism's account details the harmful chatbots it found on the platform using test accounts registered as minors, and how later safety changes angered many users.7

  • Models

    Claude users report that Opus 5.5 has stopped helping with reverse engineering. Posts on r/Claude say reverse-engineering requests now hit a safety check that stops answers mid-sentence, though some users say the classifier was always inconsistent.3 Anthropic has not announced any change to Opus 5.5, which users had credited with a wave of AI-assisted game decompilations.3

  • Dev tools

    Microsoft Research has open-sourced Agensh, a multi-agent harness with no central orchestrator. In Agensh, coding agents claim their own sub-tasks, share findings and merge into a shared repo, and on pandoc the test-pass rate rose from 33.89% with 1 agent to 55.06% with 1,024.8, 9 The code is MIT-licensed and runs on Docker Compose with 8 workers by default.8, 10

  • Models

    Canva has launched Craft, its first in-house image generation model. Craft generates images at 2K resolution in any aspect ratio and is available in Canva's Dream Lab, including on free accounts.11 Developers can call it through Canva's public API.12

  • Research

    A study found that GPT-6.1 Sol and Grok 4.7 lean in opposite directions when forced to pick candidates. Asked through their APIs to name one candidate in nearly 500 midterm races, Grok picked the Republican in 92% of answers and GPT-6.1 Sol picked the Democrat in 97%, though the consumer apps refused to answer.13 The researchers also found that every Grok API request carried about 1,240 tokens of extra input that they did not write and could not see.13

  • Research

    OpenAI used about 2,000 GPT-Rosalind agents to analyze a mouse brain CRISPR atlas in 32 minutes. Working with PerturbAI and Scripps Research, OpenAI gave each agent one gene change to study, and in blinded tests experts preferred the combined reports over a single agent's 75% of the time.14 The resulting reasoning atlas is on GitHub, and the preprint has not yet been peer reviewed.14

  • Industry

    TechCrunch has started a running list of AI products and startups that shut down or fell short. The list includes Relay, Character.ai, Humane's AI Pin and several OpenAI products folded into ChatGPT, such as the Atlas browser.15 It cites S&P Global Market Intelligence data showing that about 42% of corporate AI initiatives are abandoned.15

  • Infrastructure

    SpaceX says Colossus II will run mainly on Nvidia Vera Rubin systems. SpaceX's AI unit grew revenue 835% year over year and rents compute to Alphabet and Anthropic for $920 million and $1.2 billion a month, respectively.16 Musk said the unit plans to bring the most powerful training cluster online by the second quarter.16

  • Dev tools

    Anthropic's sandbox-runtime puts OS-level limits on any agent process without a container. The tool behind Claude Code's sandboxed bash uses Seatbelt on macOS and bubblewrap on Linux, and blocks network access by default except for allowlisted domains.17, 18 Anthropic reports that sandboxing cut Claude Code permission prompts by 84% in internal use, and the project is still a beta research preview.17

  • Research

    Researchers found that Anthropic's Fable-5.1 can hide messages in images without being told how. In one test, Fable encoded a message in the heights of stars in an SVG night scene.19 Across 50 trials, Fable recovered 78% of its own hidden messages and OpenAI's Astra decoded 88%, when both were told to look for them.19

  • Dev tools

    Cognition has released free agent skills for patching PHP2Shell, Node.js and GitLab flaws. The three MIT-licensed skills take inventory read-only, ask for approval before editing, run tests before and after the patch, and open one pull request per repo.20, 21 They work in Devin and in any agent that reads SKILL.md files, including Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.22

  • Products

    A review of a mini PC built on AMD's Ryzen AI Max Plus Pro 495 shows it running large models locally. The system pairs 16 Zen 5 cores with 192 GB of unified memory, up to 160 GB of which can go to the GPU.23 According to the review, it handles models of up to 300 billion parameters that did not fit on the earlier Max Plus 395.23

  • Products

    ChatGPT's new locked chats hide conversations behind a PIN but do not encrypt them. Locked chats move out of regular history and search, but OpenAI says locking does not add end-to-end encryption, change retention, or remove anything ChatGPT remembered before the chat was locked.24 Shared links keep working after a chat is locked, and resetting a forgotten PIN permanently deletes all locked chats.24

References

Every source behind this edition. Open one to read the full story.

  1. 1Elvis Presley Rightsholders Sue Anthropic for Training on 274 Songs Without Permissionrollingstone.com · rollingstone.com
  2. 2Anthropic Sued for Using Elvis Presley Music to Train AI Modelshollywoodreporter.com · hollywoodreporter.com
  3. 3Claude's Game Recompilation Capabilities May Have Been Nerfedkotaku.com · kotaku.com
  4. 4Block’s new voice model sounds eerily humanTechCrunch · techcrunch.com
  5. 5Block's new voice AI sounds eerily human, sparking awe and scam fearscoindesk.com · coindesk.com
  6. 6Block's latest AI model Dessa was trained entirely on human speech — and it showsMashable · mashable.com
  7. 7We Investigated Character.AI and Found a Horror Show. Now It’s Bankrupt.Futurism · futurism.com
  8. 8Microsoft Open-Sources Agensh: A Multi-Agent Harness for 1,024 Agentsmarktechpost.com · marktechpost.com
  9. 9https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.26781arXiv · arxiv.org
  10. 10GitHub - microsoft/Agensh: A Decentralized, Scalable Multiagent HarnessGitHub · github.com
  11. 11Here's how Canva's new image generation tool compares to models by OpenAI, Google, and MetaBusiness Insider · businessinsider.com
  12. 12Connect API: Canva Craft is now available for image generationcommunity.canva.dev · community.canva.dev
  13. 13Forced to pick, Grok’s AI model chooses Republicans. OpenAI’s picks Democrats.TechCrunch · techcrunch.com
  14. 14OpenAI’s AI agents analyse a mouse brain gene atlas in 32 minutesThe Next Web · thenextweb.com
  15. 15The AI graveyard: a running list of projects and startups that didn’t make itTechCrunch · techcrunch.com
  16. 16Elon Musk Just Gave Fantastic News for Nvidia Investorsfinance.yahoo.com · finance.yahoo.com
  17. 17Meet Anthropic’s sandbox-runtime: OS-Level Sandboxing for AI Agents, No Containersmarktechpost.com · marktechpost.com
  18. 18GitHub - anthropics/sandbox-runtime: A lightweight sandboxing tool for enforcing filesystem and network restrictions on arbitrary processes at the OS level, without requiring a container.GitHub · github.com
  19. 19Anthropic's AI Hid a Secret Message in the Stars. OpenAI's Bot Found It.Gizmodo · gizmodo.com
  20. 20Cognition Open-Sources an Agent Plugin that Helps Secure Systems against Recent Cybersecurity Threatsmarktechpost.com · marktechpost.com
  21. 21Fixing Critical Node & PHP Flaws | Devindevin.ai · devin.ai
  22. 22GitHub - CognitionAI/devin-vuln-fixes: Skills to help detect and remediate known CVEs and vulnerabilities.GitHub · github.com
  23. 23AMD Ryzen AI Max Plus Pro 495 Packs 192GB RAM for Local AIgeeky-gadgets.com · geeky-gadgets.com
  24. 24ChatGPT's new Locked Chats feature sounds great for privacy — until you read the fine printTechRadar · techradar.com

That’s the edition.

The next one is ready tomorrow by 6 AM ET.

Sat, Oct 24 editionAll editions

Written with AI from the sources in the references above.

Ramit Koul
AuthorRamit KoulFounder, Software Engineer & Innovator