Anthropic Elvis lawsuit: 274 Presley songs, up to $48.6M claimed

Felix Laurent 25 Oct 2026 4 min read

big tech

Elvis Presley's rights holders filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic on October 23. They say Claude was trained on the lyrics of 274 Presley compositions without a license. The case sits in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The main claim asks for up to $41.1M – the $150,000 statutory maximum for willful infringement, times 274. All three claims together come to $48.6M. It is at least the sixth suit music publishers have filed against Anthropic since 2023.

These are allegations. No court has ruled, and Anthropic has not answered the complaint.

What the complaint says

The lead plaintiff is ABG EPE IP LLC, a unit of Authentic Brands Group, which controls Presley's name, image and likeness. It is joined by publishers, trusts and individuals who own or control the 274 compositions. The case number is 5:26-cv-12473. Among the songs listed: "Can't Help Falling in Love", "All Shook Up", "Don't Be Cruel", "Return to Sender" and "(You're the) Devil in Disguise".

The suit is about compositions and lyrics, not recordings – Claude does not generate audio. The viral Pop Base post that spread the story on X said "over 250 songs"; the complaint lists 274.

The plaintiffs describe a three-step path from their catalog to Claude:

They license lyrics to sites such as Musixmatch and LyricFind, which must display them with the songwriter, publisher and other copyright management information (CMI)
Common Crawl scraped those pages, and Anthropic copied the lyrics into an internal training library
Anthropic's data-cleaning pipeline stripped the CMI before the text went into successive Claude models

The complaint also cites the record of Bartz v. Anthropic, the authors' case, to argue that books containing the lyrics came from the pirate site Library Genesis. The models it names include Claude Opus 5, Sonnet 5, Fable 5, Mythos 5, Haiku 4.5 and Claude 3 Opus.

On output, the plaintiffs say Claude's lyric guardrails cover only a narrow set of prominent songs and can be talked around. In their example, Claude was asked to recreate specific songs "for a modern audience". Per the complaint, it then described its own versions as keeping "same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording" (quoted by Rolling Stone). Lead attorney Richard Busch represented Marvin Gaye's estate in the "Blurred Lines" case. Here he wrote that Anthropic built its business on infringement at a scale never seen before.

What the plaintiffs ask for

The complaint brings three claims, each with its own statutory ceiling per work.

Claim	Law	Statutory damages	Amount named
Copyright infringement	17 U.S.C. 504(c)	Up to $150,000 per work, if willful	$41,100,000
Removing or altering CMI	17 U.S.C. 1202	Up to $25,000 per violation	$6,850,000
Circumventing protection measures	17 U.S.C. 1201	Up to $2,500 per violation	$685,000

At the amounts named, the three claims total $48,635,000. In the alternative, the complaint asks for actual damages and Anthropic's profits. It also seeks a permanent injunction covering the 274 works, an order on the copies Anthropic holds and a jury trial.

The other music suits against Anthropic

Six music suits against Anthropic are now open, all in the Northern District of California.

Case	Filed	Works	Where it stands
Concord I (Concord, UMPG, ABKCO)	Oct 2023	499	Guardrails stipulation approved Jan 2025; both sides moved for summary judgment on fair use in 2026
Concord II	Jan 2026	20,000+	Seeks $3B+ over alleged torrenting; names CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Ben Mann; dismissal hearing Nov 4
BMG	Mar 2026	493	Runs on the Concord II schedule
Round Hill	Aug 17, 2026	500	Related to Concord I and reassigned to Judge Eumi Lee
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell	Summer 2026	Not disclosed	Lyrics and sheet music, incl. the Beatles, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson
ABG EPE IP (Elvis)	Oct 23, 2026	274	Just filed

The Elvis complaint follows the same three-claim structure – infringement, CMI removal, circumvention – that publishers have used against both Anthropic and Suno this year.

Why the authors' case matters here

In June 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled in Bartz v. Anthropic that training Claude on books was fair use, but that keeping pirated copies in a central library was not. Anthropic then settled with authors for $1.5B in September 2025; the court gave final approval in July 2026.

That split shaped the music suits that followed. The newer complaints lean less on training alone and more on how the material was obtained – torrenting, pirate libraries, scraped pages with credits removed. The Elvis plaintiffs do the same.

What Anthropic says

Anthropic had not commented on the Elvis suit as of October 24, Billboard reported. In Concord I, it asked the court in April 2026 to rule that training on lyrics is transformative and therefore fair use. Responding to the Sony and Warner suit, a spokesperson said, "We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court."

What is still missing

Anthropic's answer to the complaint, the judge assignment, and whether the court relates the case to Concord I, as it did with Round Hill's suit. The next dated event across the music cases is the November 4 hearing on Anthropic's motion to dismiss parts of Concord II.