Tech and AI
The owners of Elvis Presley's music sue Anthropic, alleging that 274 of his songs were used to train its Claude models without a licence
By Staff Writer | 26 October 2026
The claim seeks up to 150,000 dollars for each song, about 41.1 million dollars in all, and says safeguards added to Claude have not stopped it reproducing protected music.
Companies that own Elvis Presley's music have sued the artificial intelligence developer Anthropic in a United States federal court, alleging that it used 274 of his songs to train its Claude models without a licence. A subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group, which controls Presley's name, image and likeness, filed the claim on Friday 23 October together with other companies that hold rights in his recordings and compositions.
Among the songs listed are Can't Help Falling in Love, All Shook Up, A Little Less Conversation and Return to Sender. For each work, the plaintiffs seek statutory damages of up to 150,000 dollars for each work, the maximum that United States copyright law allows for wilful infringement. Across 274 songs that comes to about 41.1 million dollars.
What the claim alleges
According to the complaint, Anthropic copied compositions and lyrics to train Claude without asking permission or paying for them, and that the model can now produce unauthorised versions of existing songs. It reaches beyond the Presley catalogue, alleging that Claude has produced infringing material from almost every song in every catalogue available online.
Safeguards that Anthropic introduced to stop Claude reproducing lyrics have not worked, the plaintiffs say. According to the filing, when Claude was recently asked to recreate particular songs for a modern audience, it did so and acknowledged that its versions were landing very close to the originals, with the same structure and the same hooks reused with light rewording.
The Elvis Plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before.
Richard Busch, lead attorney for the plaintiffs
One catalogue against one developer
Anthropic has not responded in public to the claim. It has previously argued that training AI models on copyrighted material can be protected as fair use under United States law.
Those earlier cases were brought by publishers. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO sued Anthropic in October 2023 over song lyrics, and Sony Music Publishing and a second major publisher filed a further claim in August this year covering lyrics and sheet music. This is one of the first claims in which the owner of a single artist's catalogue has gone to court against an AI developer on its own account.
The plaintiffs say Claude went on reproducing the structure and hooks of protected songs after Anthropic added safeguards meant to stop it.
For rights owners watching from the sidelines, the case puts a price on every song in a famous catalogue and asks a judge to decide whether training on it was lawful.