The King has entered the AI copyright fight. Owners of 274 songs recorded by Elvis Presley, including “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, “All Shook Up” and “Don’t Be Cruel”, have sued Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot. The complaint was filed on Friday 23 October (US time) in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. It alleges Anthropic copied the songs’ lyrics to train Claude without permission, and that Claude still produces close copies of famous songs when users ask it to rewrite them.
Billboard, which first reported the case, called it by far the most high-profile legal action filed on behalf of an individual musician in the wave of AI music lawsuits. Anthropic told NBC News: “We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully.” None of the claims has been tested in court.
Who is suing
The lead plaintiff is ABG EPE IP LLC, part of Authentic Brands Group, which Billboard says controls much of Elvis Presley’s catalogue as well as his trademarks and name and likeness. It is joined by music publishers Abilene Music and Raleigh Music Publishing, and by several family trusts and an individual tied to the songs’ publishing rights. Together they call themselves “The Elvis Plaintiffs”.
The 28-page complaint lists 274 works. Alongside the three songs above, it names “If I Can Dream”, “A Little Less Conversation”, “Return To Sender” and “(You’re The) Devil In Disguise”, and says Presley sold an estimated one billion records worldwide. The plaintiffs, it says, “are deeply protective of these iconic songs, as they contain some of the most renowned lyrics and melodies in music history.”
“As we say in the lawsuit, the Elvis Plaintiffs are guardians of, and highly protective of, Elvis’s song which are some of the most iconic of all time.” — Richard Busch, lawyer for the plaintiffs, in a statement to NBC News
What the complaint claims
The case is about lyrics and text rather than audio. The complaint alleges Anthropic collected text “at an industrial scale” from across the internet, including lyrics sites and large web-crawl datasets such as Common Crawl and The Pile, and that the Elvis lyrics were in those collections. It points to an admission in the earlier authors’ case, Bartz v. Anthropic, that at least one Claude model was trained on data derived from YouTube subtitles in a version of The Pile.
It also alleges that Anthropic kept copies of the works in what it calls an internal, all-purpose data library, and that it deliberately removed copyright management information such as song titles, songwriter credits and publisher names. According to the complaint, Anthropic chose a text-cleaning tool that stripped this kind of information, which it allegedly described as “boilerplate” and “useless junk”.
The “modern audience” test
The most striking part of the complaint is about what Claude produces. After music publishers first sued Anthropic in October 2023, the company added guardrails to stop Claude reproducing song lyrics. The Elvis Plaintiffs argue those guardrails “cover only a narrow subset of commercially prominent songs and are readily circumvented by rephrasing the prompt.” Claude may refuse to print the actual lyrics, the complaint says, but will still create derivative works based on them.
As evidence, it quotes a response it attributes to Claude Sonnet 5 after the model was asked to recreate songs “for a modern audience”:
“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.” — Response attributed to Claude in the complaint
That example is cited from an earlier case brought by Round Hill Music in August, which concerned songs such as the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” and Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. For the Elvis songs, the complaint states “on information and belief” that Claude has created infringing output for all 274 works, which is a claim the plaintiffs will need to prove.
How much is at stake
The plaintiffs are seeking actual damages and Anthropic’s profits or, alternatively, statutory damages of up to US$150,000 for each work willfully infringed. The complaint puts that at US$41.1 million across 274 works. It adds two claims under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, one for circumventing protections and one for removing copyright information, worth up to US$685,000 and US$6.85 million respectively.
Beyond money, they want an injunction, the impoundment or destruction of unauthorised copies of the songs, including copies in training datasets, internal repositories and model weights, and “a complete accounting of all training data, scraping activities, and datasets involving the copyrighted Works.” They have asked for a jury trial.
Part of a much bigger fight
Anthropic is already defending several music cases in the same court. Concord, Universal Music Publishing Group and ABKCO sued in October 2023 and filed a second case in January 2026. BMG, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have also sued this year, and Round Hill and Reservoir have brought cases represented by the same legal team as the Elvis Plaintiffs. We covered Reservoir’s suits, filed only two days earlier, in Reservoir Sues Suno and Anthropic Over AI Music Training.
NBC News notes that Anthropic agreed last year to pay US$1.5 billion to settle a class action brought by authors over pirated books. The legal-tracking site ChatGPT Is Eating the World counts 157 copyright suits against AI companies so far, and says this is the eighth AI music suit filed this year by the plaintiffs’ law firm, Adams and Reese.
What happens next
Anthropic will have the chance to respond, either by answering the complaint or by asking the court to dismiss it. No hearing dates have been reported. The case may also be linked to the other music publisher cases already before the court, which the complaint lists as related.
Why it matters
For songwriters and estates
Until now, most AI music lawsuits have been brought by labels, publishers and groups of musicians. This is one of the first major challenges led by the rights holders of a single, globally famous artist. If estates and catalogue owners start suing over individual legends, the pressure on AI companies to license lyrics and songs, not just recordings, will grow quickly.
For AI music creators
The “modern audience” example matters to anyone using AI to write. Asking a chatbot to update or rework a famous song can produce something very close to the original, and a new arrangement does not make it a new song. If you write lyrics with AI, check them against the songs you referenced, and keep notes on how your tracks were made.
For listeners in Australia and beyond
Elvis’s songs are part of almost every country’s musical memory, including Australia’s. How US courts treat AI training on lyrics will shape the tools people use everywhere. Australia is having its own debate about whether AI companies should be allowed to train on creative work, which we covered in Australia’s AI copyright opt-out fight.
Following AI music on Dizy
Dizy is built on disclosure: artists declare whether a track is AI-assisted or AI-generated when they submit, and listeners decide what rises. See the Overall Top 40, browse New releases and AI artists, or submit your track. For the musicians’ side of AI licensing, read Musicians Union Demands AI Consent and Pay From Labels.
Sources
Billboard: Anthropic Sued For Stealing Elvis Presley Music to Train AI (24 October 2026)
NBC News: Elvis Presley’s rights holders sue Anthropic (25 October 2026)
Rolling Stone: Elvis Presley rights holders sue Anthropic (24 October 2026)
The Guardian: Elvis Presley rights holders sue Anthropic over AI models (25 October 2026)
