The owners of Elvis Presley’s music have sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic, accusing it of using 274 of the singer’s songs to train its Claude models without permission.
The lawsuit was filed on Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group, which acquired Elvis Presley’s intellectual property and trademark rights in 2013, reported Billboard.
The other plaintiffs include music publishers Raleigh Music Publishing and Abilene Music, as well as trusts belonging to songwriter Luigi Creatore, who co-wrote “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, and the Aberbach family, whose music-publishing business controlled rights to songs recorded by Presley.
The suit states 274 songs, including “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, “All Shook Up”, “Don’t Be Cruel”, “A Little Less Conversation”, and “Return to Sender”, were copied without permission and used to train Anthropic’s Claude AI models.
The plaintiffs have claimed that Anthropic infringed their copyrights without a licence or payment, and the company retained copies in an internal library for training future versions of its models.
“The Elvis Plaintiffs’ iconic collective catalog contains some of the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history,” the lawsuit reads.
“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,” lead attorney Richard Busch wrote in a statement, according to Pitchfork. “The Elvis Plaintiffs are deeply protective of these iconic songs.”
“We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully,” Anthropic told NBC News.
The complaint alleges that Anthropic collected copyrighted lyrics from across the internet, including through web-crawl archives and datasets, and retained the material in an internal repository for use in developing successive versions of Claude.
The plaintiffs argue that keeping the songs in this central library constituted copyright infringement in its own right, separate from any subsequent use in training the AI models.
Additionally, Anthropic used the songs without permission, “removing identifying information from those works”, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The plaintiffs also claim that Claude continues to reproduce copyrighted material despite safeguards Anthropic agreed to maintain after music publishers sued the company over song lyrics in 2023. When asked to recreate songs “for a modern audience”, the AI produced versions with the “same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges”, the complaint states.
The Independent has reached out to Anthropic for comment.
The rights holders are seeking up to $41.1m in damages for alleged copyright infringement, calculated at $150,000 for each of the 274 songs. They are also seeking $685,000 over the alleged circumvention of copyright protections and $6.85m for the alleged removal of copyright information, bringing their total claim to $48.6m.
The complaint also seeks a permanent injunction to prevent further infringement and an order requiring Anthropic to destroy unauthorised copies of the copyrighted works.
Anthropic is already facing several lawsuits from music publishers who have accused it of using copyrighted lyrics to train its Claude AI models without permission.
Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO Music sued the company in 2023 over 499 musical works. They expanded their legal action in January 2026, seeking more than $3bn over alleged infringement involving more than 20,000 works.
At a hearing on 21 October, the publishers argued that Claude could reproduce their lyrics, while Anthropic maintained that using copyrighted material to train its models was protected by fair use.
BMG Rights Management filed a separate lawsuit in March 2026, followed by Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music in August. Both sets of publishers accuse Anthropic of using copyrighted music without permission, with allegations including unauthorised downloading and the removal of copyright information.
Anthropic has also faced a lawsuit from authors who accused it of using pirated books to train Claude. The company agreed to a $1.5bn settlement, approved by a US court in July 2026.
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