Elvis Presley rights holders sue Anthropic over 274 songs

Authentic Brands Group, the licensing platform that controls Elvis Presley's music and likeness rights, and a coalition of co-plaintiffs sued Anthropic PBC in California federal court, alleging the maker of the Claude chatbot trained its AI models on 274 Presley songs without permission.

The suit was filed Friday, October 23, according to MusicTech, which attributes the filing day to MusicRadar. The case is ABG EPE IP LLC v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-12473, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. A unit of Authentic Brands Group leads the plaintiffs alongside Raleigh Music Publishing LLC, Abilene Music LLC, the individual Jason Simeon Aberbach, and trusts connected to the Aberbach family and to Luigi Creatore, a co-writer of Can't Help Falling in Love. The plaintiffs ask for a jury trial.

The complaint alleges Anthropic knowingly and willfully infringed copyright throughout the development of Claude. According to the filing, Anthropic scraped song lyrics from approved internet sites, deliberately stripped out Copyright Management Information such as songwriter, composer and music publisher credits, and assembled the copied text into a database it then used to train its models. Presley died in 1977, and the plaintiffs' catalog "contains some of the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history," the suit states. CBC reported that the plaintiffs describe the conduct as "infringing copyrights at an unfathomable scale."

The complaint names songs including "All Shook Up," "Can't Help Falling in Love," "Don't Be Cruel," "Farther Along," "If You Think I Don't Need You" and "Run On." Pitchfork, which viewed the filing, reported the last five. The same outlet reported the plaintiffs' allegation that Claude can produce "unlicensed derivative works," and the filing's citation of a Claude response describing its own rewrites of songs as landing "very close to the originals" with the same structure and hooks. MusicTech reported the plaintiffs' claim that Claude can produce near-copies of his songs.

On damages, the plaintiffs seek more than $41 million (US), the statutory maximum of $150,000 per work applied across the 274 songs. MusicTech reported that separate claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act bring the pleaded total to $48.6 million. According to the complaint, the plaintiffs also ask the court for injunctive relief and damages for the alleged circumvention of access controls and the alleged removal of copyright management information.

Anthropic disputed the claims. "We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully," an Anthropic spokesperson told Reuters, a statement Pitchfork also reported. The company has yet to respond to the complaint in court.

The Elvis case lands during a busy stretch for Anthropic's public profile. The company filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, October 26, for a proposed initial public offering, and intends to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol "ANT." The number of shares and the price range have not been determined.

It is one of several copyright fights Anthropic is carrying. In October 2023, a group of music publishers including Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO sued Anthropic over song lyrics drawn from hundreds of works. CBC reported that case is still pending in the Northern District of California. CBC also reported that a U.S. judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement of a separate class action brought by authors this past July. Pitchfork noted the Elvis filing is one of the first high-profile suits in which the owner of a single artist's catalog has sued an AI developer directly.

For creators who build with Claude or rival models, the case adds weight to a question that is still open in court: what a model is permitted to learn from, and what its outputs may reproduce. The allegations here are untested. Nothing in the complaint has been proved, and Anthropic has said it will contest them.

Anthropic has not yet answered the complaint in court, and its proposed listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol ANT sits ahead of it on the public calendar; the case number, for anyone following the docket, is 5:26-cv-12473.