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

The owners of songs made famous by Elvis Presley have taken Anthropic to court. They say its Claude chatbot learned the lyrics of almost 300 of his recordings without permission or payment. The songs include All Shook Up, Can’t Help Falling in Love, Don’t Be Cruel and Return to Sender. The owners want more than money. They want every copy of those lyrics destroyed. They also count Claude’s model weights, the trained core of the chatbot, as one of those copies.

This demand makes the case different from a usual claim for money. It also affects something many Claude users have started doing without much thought: asking the chatbot to write a song in the style of a famous artist or change a chorus for a wedding. The plaintiffs say these requests produce versions of their songs without permission and that Anthropic knew this was happening.

The main plaintiff is ABG EPE IP, a part of Authentic Brands Group. It controls Presley’s name and likeness and owns some of the publishing rights to songs he recorded. Other plaintiffs include Raleigh Music Publishing, Abilene Music and trusts connected to the Aberbach family and Luigi Creatore. The Aberbach family’s company, Hill and Range, co-owned Presley’s music publishing companies. Creatore helped write Can’t Help Falling in Love. The complaint names 274 songs. The plaintiffs’ lead lawyer, Richard Busch, won the Blurred Lines case for Marvin Gaye’s family.

The plaintiffs want compensation for their actual losses and Anthropic’s profits. As another option, they seek the maximum legal payment for deliberate copyright infringement: $150,000 per song, or $41.1 million in total. They also make two claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. One seeks $685,000 over claims that Anthropic got past login requirements, paywalls and software designed to block bots on licensed lyrics websites. The other seeks $6.85 million because songwriter and publisher credits were allegedly removed before training. The total amount claimed is just over $48.6 million. The complaint compares this with Anthropic, which it says is valued at $1.2 trillion in secondary markets.

The claim about missing credits is the most detailed part of the complaint. The plaintiffs say Anthropic tested three tools for extracting text and chose one called Newspaper because it removed song titles, songwriter names and publisher details more completely. It rejected another tool, jusText, which left copyright notices in place. The plaintiffs argue that a model trained on lyrics without credits cannot tell users who wrote the lines it repeats, making copyright violations harder to spot. The complaint also says the lyrics came to Claude from lyrics websites, the Common Crawl web archive, a collection of YouTube subtitles and pirated books downloaded through BitTorrent. A judge examined the use of pirated books in an earlier case brought by authors.

The evidence specifically involving Presley’s songs is less detailed than the number of songs might suggest. As Music Business Worldwide noted, the complaint does not include a single Claude response that copies any of the 274 songs. Its strongest quotation comes from a different lawsuit about songs owned by Round Hill Music, including Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls. In that case, Claude Sonnet 5 reportedly admitted that its rewrites of songs for modern audiences were “edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song.” For Presley’s songs, the plaintiffs say they believe Claude has produced infringing material for every song listed. They say Anthropic’s own records will prove this. An Anthropic spokesperson said the company disagrees with the claims and plans to defend itself fully in court. Anthropic argues that training on copyrighted text is allowed under fair use.

The complaint also acknowledges something users may already know. Claude Haiku 4.5 and Sonnet 5 already refuse to print complete song lyrics because of copyright concerns. Anthropic added this filter after music publishers first sued the company. The dispute now focuses on other kinds of requests, including songs that copy an original style, parodies and rewrites that update old songs. If Anthropic loses, it might refuse more song-related requests from all users in every country where Claude is available, even though this case is being heard in the United States under US law.

Anthropic already faces at least six other lawsuits over musical works in the same court. Universal Music, Concord and ABKCO sued the company in October 2023 and later expanded their claim to cover more than 20,000 works. BMG filed a lawsuit in March 2026, followed by Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and Round Hill in August. Anthropic also paid $1.5 billion to settle a case brought by book authors over pirated books. The Presley complaint refers to that case several times.

The Presley complaint was filed on October 23 in federal court in San Francisco. Anthropic must now respond to it. The next important decision is expected in the older case brought by music publishers. A judge heard Anthropic’s fair-use arguments on October 21 but has not yet made a decision.

Whatever the judge decides about training AI on copyrighted material will also matter in this case. The owners of Presley’s songs are arguing that fair use should not protect a chatbot that knows songs well enough to rewrite them when users ask.