Elvis Presley's Rights Holders Sue Anthropic, Alleging Claude Trained on 274 Songs

The people who own Elvis Presley's music want to be paid. On Friday, Oct. 23, they sued Anthropic in federal court in San Francisco, alleging the company trained its Claude AI models on 274 Presley songs without permission and without paying a cent.

The plaintiffs are a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group, the licensing company that controls Presley's name, image and much of his intellectual property, along with other companies, trusts and individuals that hold rights to his music.

What the complaint alleges

The 274 works include "All Shook Up," "Can't Help Falling in Love," "Don't Be Cruel," "A Little Less Conversation," "Return to Sender" and "(You're the) Devil in Disguise."

The plaintiffs say the infringement ran through "the entire development" of Claude and continues today, as users prompt the model to reproduce lyrics or build unauthorized adaptations. They also allege Anthropic kept the songs in "a permanent, general-purpose central library intended to be retained indefinitely," and copied subsets from it to train later versions of Claude.

The filing cites the alleged mass scraping of internet content and the pirating of books as part of how Claude was built. It claims Anthropic removed identifying information from works it used.

The complaint also targets Anthropic's safeguards. After Anthropic was sued, it put up guardrails meant to stop Claude from spitting out existing lyrics. The plaintiffs say that did not work. According to the complaint, when Claude was recently asked to recreate specific songs "for a modern audience," it produced versions and then described them itself: "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."

Those are the plaintiffs' allegations. No court has tested them.

The money and the demands

The plaintiffs seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. Across 274 songs, that comes to $41.1 million. They also want a permanent injunction against further infringement and a court order requiring Anthropic to destroy every unauthorized copy of the works.

Anthropic has already paid far more to settle a similar fight. Last year it agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with authors who said it trained models on pirated copies of their books. It was the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history.

Anthropic's response

"We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully," an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement Sunday.

The company has previously maintained that training AI models on copyrighted material can be protected under U.S. fair use law. That is the central legal question in this fight, and it has not been settled for song lyrics. Fair use is a defense, not a loophole. It asks courts to weigh the purpose of the use, how much was taken and the effect on the market for the original.

The plaintiffs argue the market effect is the point. Their complaint says unauthorized reuse "is destroying the value of these works in a matter of a few years with only profit as its motive."

Claude is a text model, not an audio generator. Earlier music suits against Anthropic have centered on lyrics and compositions, not recordings of an artist's voice.

A crowded docket

Lead plaintiffs' attorney Richard Busch, of the firm Adams & Reese, won the Marvin Gaye estate's "Blurred Lines" case against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. The complaint says at least a half dozen suits over musical compositions and AI training are already pending in federal court in San Francisco.

Two days before the Presley filing, on Oct. 21, the music publisher Reservoir sued Anthropic and the AI music company Suno. Reservoir's complaint against Anthropic alleges Claude was trained on the lyrics of 853 of its compositions and seeks statutory damages the complaint puts at $127.95 million.

The earlier wave goes back to October 2023, when Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO sued Anthropic over lyrics to songs by Katy Perry, Gloria Gaynor and The Rolling Stones. NME reports that Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell also sued over lyrics and sheet music from artists including The Beatles, Taylor Swift and Michael Jackson.

The Presley case stands out because the plaintiffs hold the catalog of a single artist rather than a label or publisher's broad roster. Pitchfork and Rolling Stone both describe it as one of the first major actions of its kind.

What comes next

Anthropic has not yet filed a response in court. The Presley plaintiffs will have to prove both that Claude copied the songs and that the copying was willful, the finding that supports the $150,000-per-song ceiling. Anthropic will have to show that training on lyrics is fair use. A ruling on that question in any of the music cases pending in San Francisco would shape how much of the roughly $41 million, and far larger sums in the related suits, is ever at risk.