Elvis Presley's song owners sue Anthropic, saying Claude was trained on 274 of his songs

The music of Elvis Presley has entered the fight over how AI models are trained. On Friday, 23 October 2026, the companies and family trusts that own 274 of his songs sued Anthropic, the company behind Claude, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The case is called ABG EPE IP LLC et al. v. Anthropic PBC, case number 5:26-cv-12473.

The songs include some of the best known recordings in pop history: "Can't Help Falling in Love", "Don't Be Cruel", "A Little Less Conversation", "All Shook Up", "Return to Sender" and "(You're the) Devil in Disguise". The plaintiffs say Anthropic copied the lyrics of all 274 to train Claude without asking and without paying, and that Claude still turns out near copies of the songs today.

Billboard was first to report the suit, in a story by Bill Donahue. Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter followed. Everything in the complaint is an allegation at this stage. No court has ruled on any of it, and Anthropic had not commented on the Elvis suit when the reports came out.

Who is suing

The lead plaintiff is ABG EPE IP LLC, a unit of Authentic Brands Group. Authentic is the licensing company that controls much of the Presley business: a large part of the song catalogue, the trademarks, and the rights to his name, image and likeness. It is joined by music publishers Abilene Music and Raleigh Music Publishing, by trusts and members of the Aberbach family, whose Hill and Range company published many of Presley's 1950s hits, and by the trust of Luigi Creatore, one of the writers of "Can't Help Falling in Love".

The lawyer behind the case is Richard Busch of the firm Adams and Reese. Busch is a familiar name in music law. He has represented Eminem's interests in earlier copyright fights and won the much debated "Blurred Lines" verdict for the family of Marvin Gaye against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams.

The complaint opens with a sharp line: "The Elvis Plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before." Busch adds that the plaintiffs "are deeply protective of these iconic songs."

Rolling Stone points out why the case stands out. Music companies such as Universal, Warner and Sony have sued AI firms before, but this is one of the first major cases brought on behalf of a single artist's catalogue, and it is about arguably the most famous recording artist of all time.

What the complaint claims

The suit makes three separate legal claims, and the two smaller ones are worth noticing because they go beyond the familiar question of whether AI training is fair use.

Copyright infringement. The core claim is that Anthropic copied the lyrics of the 274 songs into its training data and that Claude produces "unlicensed derivative works" based on them. The plaintiffs ask for the statutory maximum of $150,000 per song for wilful infringement, which comes to $41.1 million.

Circumvention of access controls. Under Section 1201 of the US copyright law, the plaintiffs say technical protections were bypassed to collect the lyrics. They ask for $2,500 per song, or $685,000.

Removal of copyright information. Under Section 1202, they say song titles and writer credits were stripped from the lyrics when the training data was cleaned. They ask for $25,000 per song, or $6.85 million.

Added up, the plaintiffs put the statutory damages at about $48.6 million. That is the figure most reports use as the total, while the $41.1 million headline number covers only the infringement count. As an alternative to statutory damages, they can also claim actual damages and Anthropic's profits.

The money is only part of it. The plaintiffs want a permanent injunction, a jury trial and a full accounting of Anthropic's training data and scraping activity involving the songs. They also ask the court to order every unlicensed copy of the songs impounded or destroyed, including copies held in "training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure". If a court ever took that request literally, it would raise the question of what destroying a song inside a trained model even means.

How the lyrics allegedly reached Claude

The complaint describes several routes. According to the reports on the filing, it says the lyrics came in through web scrapes such as Common Crawl, which in turn copied them from licensed lyrics sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind. It names The Pile, a well known open training dataset, and says its YouTube Subtitles section contains "Can't Help Falling in Love" and "Don't Be Cruel". It also lists Books3, copies from the Internet Archive, and BitTorrent downloads of pirate libraries such as Library Genesis, PiLiMi and Z-Library.

For the pirate library part, the plaintiffs lean on another case. In Bartz v. Anthropic, a class action by book authors, the court found that the company had downloaded millions of pirated books from such libraries. In June 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled that training on books Anthropic had bought was fair use, but that keeping pirated copies in a central library was not. Anthropic then agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the case. The Elvis complaint uses that history to argue that fair use cannot cover copies that came from pirate sites and were kept for good.

The Claude quote at the centre of the case

The most unusual part of the complaint is about output, not training. After music publishers led by Concord sued Anthropic in October 2023, Anthropic added guardrails to stop Claude from reciting song lyrics. The plaintiffs accept that Claude now declines to print lyrics on request. Their argument is that the guardrails are easy to get around.

According to the complaint, when Claude Haiku 4.5 and Claude Sonnet 5 were asked to recreate specific songs "for a modern audience", they did so. The complaint then quotes Claude's own assessment of what it had produced: "These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges. That's edging past 'inspired by' into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out."

It is a striking piece of evidence, because the model itself describes its output as something close to copying. But it should be read with care. A chatbot's commentary on its own answer is not a legal test for infringement, and the complaint states that Claude has produced infringing output for all 274 songs without giving an example for each one. According to AI Chat Daily, the filing names Claude Opus 5, Sonnet 5, Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as models that allegedly contain copies of the works, and also refers to Claude Haiku 4.5 and Claude 3 Opus. Whether any of those models really reproduce the songs, and whether a rewritten song counts as an infringing derivative work, is exactly what a court would have to decide.

A template for more lawsuits

The Elvis case did not come out of nowhere. Two days earlier, on 21 October, Busch filed two other suits in the same court on behalf of the music publisher Reservoir. According to Music Business Worldwide, one targets the AI song generator Suno over 1,050 compositions, with $157.5 million in statutory damages for infringement. The other targets Anthropic over 853 compositions, including Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Both Sides Now", Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" and Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach", with a statutory total of $127.95 million. The Reservoir v. Anthropic docket is public on Justia.

Both Anthropic complaints come from the same lawyer, the same court and the same week, and they follow the same basic structure: a list of works, statutory damages per work, and claims about training data and guardrails. That suggests Busch has built a template that other catalogue owners can join with little extra effort. The legal argument stays the same. Only the list of songs and the damages total change.

For Anthropic, that is the real risk. A single $48.6 million claim is small next to the company's size. But each new catalogue adds damages, discovery requests and legal costs, and the reports count at least six suits over song lyrics now pending against Anthropic in the same court. In the Reservoir case, Anthropic said: "We disagree with the allegations and intend to defend this case vigorously."

Where Anthropic stands

Anthropic is already defending music cases brought by Concord, Universal Music Publishing Group and ABKCO, and by other major publishers. It also faces lawsuits from outside music. Like other AI companies, it argues that training models on copyrighted works is fair use, because the model learns patterns rather than storing and selling copies. That question is still open in dozens of cases in the United States, and courts have reached different results depending on the facts.

The Bartz ruling gave both sides something. AI companies point to the finding that training on lawfully bought books was fair use. Rights holders point to the finding that pirated copies were not covered, and to the $1.5 billion settlement that followed. The Elvis complaint is built to land on the second side of that line: it stresses pirate libraries, kept copies and stripped credits rather than relying only on the act of training.

What it means for creators and AI users

For musicians and publishers, the Elvis case is a signal that the fight over AI training is moving from big label portfolios to individual legacy catalogues. If a template lawsuit can be filed for one famous catalogue in two days, many other estates and publishers can follow.

For people who use Claude and other chatbots, the practical effect is likely to be stricter guardrails around song lyrics and close imitations. Requests like "rewrite this famous song for today" sit right where the complaint draws its line between inspiration and reproduction, so AI companies have a reason to refuse or water down such requests.

For the AI industry, the case adds to the pressure for licensing deals. Suno reached a settlement and licensing deal with Warner Music Group in 2025, while it still faces other suits such as Reservoir's. Anthropic has so far chosen to fight the music cases. The more catalogues join, the more expensive that choice becomes.

What happens next

The case is at the very beginning. The complaint is the first entry on the docket, and Anthropic will have to respond in the coming weeks, most likely with a motion to dismiss or by arguing fair use. Meanwhile the older Concord case is further along, and any ruling there on lyrics, guardrails and training will shape how strong the Elvis and Reservoir claims really are.

Until then, the lawsuit is a clear marker of where the copyright debate is heading. The question is no longer only whether AI companies may train on creative work. It is also where the data came from, whether credits were stripped along the way, and whether a model that refuses to print lyrics can still recreate a song closely enough to count as a copy.

Sources: Billboard (24 October 2026); Rolling Stone (24 October 2026); The Hollywood Reporter; Music Business Worldwide on the Reservoir suits (22 October 2026); Reservoir v. Anthropic docket, Justia; AI Chat Daily summary of the complaint; MadRobot summary of the complaint.