Elvis Presley’s song owners want 274 hits wiped from Anthropic’s Claude

The owners of songs Elvis Presley made famous have taken Anthropic to court, saying its Claude chatbot learned the lyrics of almost three hundred of his recordings without a license or a cent in payment. The catalog includes All Shook Up, Can’t Help Falling in Love, Don’t Be Cruel and Return to Sender. The remedy they ask for goes further than money: they want every copy of those lyrics destroyed, and the complaint counts Claude’s model weights, the trained core of the chatbot, as one of those copies.

That demand is what separates this suit from a routine damages claim. It also reaches a habit many Claude users have picked up without thinking about it, asking the chatbot for a song in the style of a famous artist or for a reworked chorus to read at a wedding. The plaintiffs say those requests produce unlicensed versions of their songs and that Anthropic knew it.

The lead plaintiff is ABG EPE IP, the Authentic Brands Group unit that controls Presley’s name and likeness and holds part of the publishing rights in songs he recorded. It is joined by Raleigh Music Publishing, Abilene Music and trusts tied to the Aberbach family, whose firm Hill and Range co-owned Presley’s publishing companies, and to Luigi Creatore, a co-writer of Can’t Help Falling in Love. The complaint lists 274 compositions. Their lead lawyer, Richard Busch, won the Blurred Lines case for Marvin Gaye’s family.

The plaintiffs seek actual damages and Anthropic’s profits or, as an alternative, the statutory ceiling for willful infringement of $150,000 per song, which comes to $41.1 million. Two further claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act add $685,000 for allegedly scraping past logins, paywalls and bot blockers on licensed lyrics services, and $6.85 million for removing songwriter and publisher credits before training. The pleaded total is just over $48.6 million, set against a company the filing itself values at $1.2 trillion on secondary markets.

The credits claim is the most specific part of the filing. According to the complaint, Anthropic tested three text-extraction tools and chose one called Newspaper because it stripped song titles, songwriter names and publisher details more thoroughly, after passing over another tool, jusText, that left copyright notices in place. A model trained on lyrics without credits cannot tell a user who wrote the verse it is echoing, which the plaintiffs say makes infringement harder to spot. The filing also says the lyrics reached Claude through lyrics sites, the Common Crawl web archive, a dataset of YouTube subtitles and pirated books downloaded over BitTorrent, a practice a judge examined in an earlier case brought by authors.

The evidence for the Presley songs themselves is thinner than the headline figure suggests. The complaint does not print a single Claude answer that reproduces one of the 274 works, as Music Business Worldwide noted. Its sharpest quote, in which Claude Sonnet 5 concedes that its rewrites of songs for a modern audience were “edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song,” comes from a separate lawsuit over songs owned by Round Hill Music, including the Goo Goo Dolls’ Iris. For Presley’s catalog, the plaintiffs claim on information and belief that Claude has produced infringing output for every one of the songs and say Anthropic’s own logs will prove it. An Anthropic spokesperson said the company disagrees with the claims and intends to defend the case fully, and Anthropic maintains that training on copyrighted text is fair use.

The complaint also concedes something users will recognize. Claude Haiku 4.5 and Sonnet 5 already refuse to print full song lyrics, citing copyright, a filter Anthropic added after music publishers first sued it. The fight has moved to everything around that refusal, from pastiches and parodies to modernized rewrites. A loss could push Anthropic toward stricter refusals on song prompts for everyone, in every country where Claude is sold, even though this is a US case decided under US law.

Anthropic already faces at least six other lawsuits over musical compositions in the same court. Universal Music, Concord and ABKCO sued in October 2023 and later widened their claim to more than 20,000 works; BMG followed in March 2026, and Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and Round Hill in August. The company also paid $1.5 billion to settle with book authors over pirated books, a case the Presley complaint quotes repeatedly.

The Presley complaint was filed on October 23 in the federal court in San Francisco, and Anthropic now has to answer it. The ruling to watch comes first from the publishers’ older case, where a judge heard Anthropic’s fair-use argument on October 21 and has not yet decided.

Whatever that judge says about training will land in this case too. The Presley owners are betting that fair use cannot cover a chatbot that knows the songs well enough to rewrite them on request.

Tags: Anthropic, ai, Claude, Elvis Presley, music industry, Authentic Brands Group