Elvis Song Owners Sue Anthropic, Alleging Claude Trained on 274 Songs

The companies and trusts that own rights to Elvis Presley’s songs have sued Anthropic, alleging that the maker of Claude copied the lyrics of 274 compositions to train its AI models without permission. The case, ABG EPE IP LLC et al. v. Anthropic PBC, was filed on Friday 23 October in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The seven plaintiffs, who call themselves “The Elvis Plaintiffs”, are led by ABG EPE IP LLC, which Billboard reported is a unit of Authentic Brands Group, the licensing company that controls much of Presley’s catalogue and his name and likeness. The complaint names hits including “All Shook Up”, “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, “Don’t Be Cruel” and “A Little Less Conversation”, and says the full list is in an attached Exhibit A. That exhibit is missing from the 28-page filing posted by ChatGPT Is Eating the World.

The complaint alleges lyrics reached Claude through web-crawl datasets

The complaint alleges that Anthropic “collected text at an industrial scale from across the internet—including from lyrics aggregation sites, streaming-platform metadata, and large-scale web-crawl archives”, naming Common Crawl and The Pile. It says The Pile’s YouTube Subtitles subset includes “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Don’t Be Cruel”. It quotes an admission by Anthropic in the Bartz books case that at least one Claude model “was trained on certain data derived from YouTube subtitles found in a public dataset that Anthropic understands to be a version of The Pile, or components thereof.”

The plaintiffs also allege that Anthropic keeps each of the works in an “internal, all-purpose data repository”, and that this retention “constitutes standalone direct infringement, independent of any downstream training use.” They say Anthropic chose text-cleaning software that stripped song titles, the names of composers and copyright notices, information they say Anthropic referred to as “boilerplate” and “useless junk”.

On outputs, the complaint says the guardrails Anthropic added after earlier lawsuits “cover only a narrow subset of commercially prominent songs and are readily circumvented by rephrasing the prompt”. It alleges that “Claude Haiku 4.5 and Sonnet 5 will both advise that they are not able to reproduce the actual song lyrics due to copyright restrictions, they have no problem creating derivative works based upon those copyrighted lyrics.”

Its most striking exhibit is a Claude response, given 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.” The footnote supporting that passage cites the Round Hill Music case against Anthropic and outputs for “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” and Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. The complaint then states: “On information and belief, Claude has created infringing output for all 274 of the Works”.

The money sought is the statutory maximum on every song

The plaintiffs bring three claims: direct copyright infringement, circumventing protection measures, and removing copyright management information. For infringement they ask for actual damages and profits “or in the alternative, statutory damages of up to $150,000 per Work willfully infringed”, and “seek the maximum amount of $41,100,000”. The two other claims seek “a total of $685,000” at $2,500 per violation and “a total of $6,850,000” at $25,000 per violation. The complaint gives no combined figure; by TSN’s arithmetic the three come to $48.635m.

They also want an order to impound or destroy copies of the songs, “including copies retained in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure”, and “a complete accounting of all training data, scraping activities, and datasets involving the copyrighted Works”. Retention of training copies is already a live issue in music cases: Suno admitted on 20 October that it has not deleted all the recordings it used to train its models. The plaintiffs demand a jury trial.

Busch filed Reservoir’s claim two days earlier, with the same opening line

The complaint is signed by Richard S. Busch of Adams & Reese in Nashville, with co-counsel Skaggs Faucette in San Francisco. Busch also signed the complaint Reservoir filed against Anthropic on 21 October, which TSN reported on Thursday. Both allege that Anthropic “has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before”, and both quote the same Claude response about renders. Billboard noted that Busch represented Marvin Gaye’s estate in the “Blurred Lines” case.

The Elvis filing lists the earlier music cases against Anthropic as related, including the one brought by Universal, Concord and ABKCO. In that case Judge Eumi Lee heard Anthropic’s fair-use arguments on 21 October without ruling. Anthropic argued there that lyrics were collected only as a byproduct of assembling a large training set.

Anthropic has not commented on the Elvis suit. Billboard said a representative did not immediately return a request for comment on Saturday, and TSN found no public statement from the company by Sunday 25 October.

The Elvis songs carry the headline, but the output evidence comes from other catalogues

The complaint is strongest where it names specific Elvis material: two songs it says sit in a dataset that Anthropic has admitted using in another case. Its weakest link is output. The only Claude response quoted at length is word for word the one in Reservoir’s complaint, and the footnote behind it points to songs by the Goo Goo Dolls, James Brown and Bonnie Tyler. The claim that Claude produced infringing output for every one of the 274 works is pleaded on information and belief. That probably leaves the Elvis plaintiffs relying on discovery to show what Claude did with Presley’s songs specifically, and on the training-data allegations until then.

The $41.1m figure depends on a fair-use question another judge is deciding

The $41.1m is a ceiling. It assumes a jury finds wilful infringement of every work and awards the top rate on each, and it is pleaded only as an alternative to actual damages. The more consequential request is the one aimed at model weights, because destroying copies held there would go well beyond a cheque. Neither outcome arrives before courts settle whether training on lyrics is fair use at all, and Judge Lee’s ruling on the Concord lyrics case will be the first on lyrics training. The Elvis plaintiffs have added the most famous name in the queue, not a new legal theory. Their fortunes, like Reservoir’s, now ride on a ruling in someone else’s case.

TSN tracks these cases on its AI copyright lawsuits hub.

Sources

• ABG EPE IP LLC et al. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-12473 (N.D. Cal.), Complaint, 23 October 2026 (via ChatGPT Is Eating the World)
• Reservoir Media Management, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-12308 (N.D. Cal.), Complaint, 21 October 2026 (CourtListener RECAP)
• Concord Music Group v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:24-cv-03811, Anthropic’s reply in support of summary judgment (CourtListener RECAP)
• ChatGPT Is Eating the World: Copyright owners to Elvis songs sues Anthropic, 24 October 2026
• Billboard: Anthropic Sued For Stealing Elvis Presley Music to Train AI, 24 October 2026
• Rolling Stone: Elvis Presley Rightsholders Sue Anthropic for Training on 274 Songs Without Permission, 24 October 2026

Related stories

• Reservoir Sues Anthropic and Suno, Alleging AI Trained on Its Songs
• Anthropic Seeks Fair-Use Ruling on Claude Lyrics as Judge Weighs First AI Trial
• Suno Admits in Court It Has Not Deleted All AI Training Recordings
• AI Copyright Lawsuits: Cases, Rulings and Deals