The owners of songs made famous by Elvis Presley are suing Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot Claude.
Their complaint alleges that Anthropic copied the lyrics of 274 songs recorded by Presley to train its AI models, without a license or payment.
It also alleges that Claude generates copies of those lyrics, and new works based on them, in response to user prompts.
The complaint was filed on October 23 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The filing, obtained by MBW, can be read in full here.
The lead plaintiff is ABG EPE IP LLC, part of Authentic Brands Group (ABG), which controls Presley’s name and likeness and holds a share of the publishing rights in songs he recorded.
The other plaintiffs are Raleigh Music Publishing, Abilene Music, Jason Simeon Aberbach, and trusts connected to the Aberbach family and to Luigi Creatore, one of the co-writers of Can’t Help Falling in Love.
In 2016, MBW reported that Raleigh Music Group had started representing the Elvis Presley catalog worldwide on behalf of the family of Jean Aberbach. Jean and his brother Julian founded Hill and Range, which co-owned Presley’s publishing companies with the singer.
In 2022, MBW reported that Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) had struck an exclusive global deal with ABG to represent the Presley song catalog ABG controls, excluding the UK. UMPG is also a plaintiff in two separate lawsuits against Anthropic (see below).
Among the 274 works at issue, the complaint names All Shook Up, Can’t Help Falling in Love, Don’t Be Cruel, A Little Less Conversation, and Return to Sender.
“The Elvis Plaintiffs’ iconic collective catalog contains some of the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history, with Elvis Presley selling over an estimated one billion records worldwide, and generating billions of streams across the globe,” the complaint states.
“Anthropic’s business model was admittedly and clearly: infringe now, and hope for a two-trillion-dollar IPO later,” it adds.
It also claims Anthropic was valued at USD $1.2 trillion on secondary markets as of July 2026, and says the company is “gunning for a $2 trillion IPO.”
The plaintiffs are seeking actual damages and Anthropic’s profits or, alternatively, statutory damages of up to USD $150,000 per work willfully infringed. The complaint puts the statutory total for the 274 works at USD $41.1 million.
Two further counts under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act carry stated totals of USD $685,000 and USD $6.85 million.
The first concerns Anthropic’s alleged use of scraping tools to get around logins, paywalls, bot-detection systems, and other barriers on licensed lyrics and streaming platforms.
The second concerns Anthropic’s alleged removal of song titles, songwriter credits, and publisher details – known as copyright management information, or CMI – from the lyrics before training.
Across the three counts, the figures pleaded come to just over USD $48.6 million.
On top of damages, the plaintiffs want the court to order Anthropic to stop the alleged infringement and to hand over all unauthorized copies of the songs for impoundment or destruction, “including copies retained in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure.”
Model weights are the learned values that make up a trained AI model, so the demand, if granted, would reach the Claude models themselves.
The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic collected text “at an industrial scale” from across the internet, including from lyrics sites and datasets such as Common Crawl and The Pile.
Citing publicly available sources, they claim a section of The Pile made up of YouTube subtitles includes the lyrics to Can’t Help Falling in Love and Don’t Be Cruel, among other Presley songs.
The complaint says Anthropic admitted in Bartz v. Anthropic, a separate copyright case brought by book authors, that “at least one commercially released and generally accessible 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.”
Relying on a July 2025 ruling in Bartz, the complaint alleges that Anthropic used BitTorrent to download millions of pirated books from Library Genesis. It says these included “hundreds or more books that contain the Works’ lyrics.”
Because BitTorrent users share files with others as they download them, the plaintiffs also accuse Anthropic of distributing copies of the songs.
They further allege that Anthropic keeps the songs in an internal library that “functions as a permanent stockpile of copyrighted material that Anthropic can return to whenever it wishes to train a new model, fine-tune an existing one, or pursue any other commercial application.”
The complaint alleges that, after testing at least three text-extraction tools, Anthropic chose one called Newspaper for how thoroughly it stripped out CMI.
According to the filing, the company passed over another, jusText, because it left in footnotes containing copyright notices and owner names, which Anthropic referred to as “boilerplate” and “useless junk.”
The plaintiffs argue that Anthropic’s engineers “understood – or at a minimum should have understood – that the absence of CMI in training data would ensure that Claude could not reproduce that information when generating outputs, thereby concealing the provenance of copyrighted material embedded in those outputs and making infringement harder for rights holders to detect.”
The complaint leads with a response it attributes to Claude Sonnet 5 after a request to rewrite 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,” Claude said, according to the filing.
“That is, Claude admitted that it was creating unlicensed reproductions of copyrighted works after it had already created multiple unlicensed derivatives,” the complaint adds.
That exchange did not involve a Presley song.
The complaint cites Round Hill Music’s lawsuit against Anthropic, filed by the same legal team on August 17, as its source.
That filing included the same response in relation to rewrites of three Round Hill songs, including the Goo Goo Dolls’ Iris, as MBW reported at the time.
The Presley complaint does not set out an example of Claude reproducing or rewriting one of the 274 songs.
Instead, it alleges “on information and belief” that Claude “has created infringing output for all 274 of the Works,” adding that further evidence sits in Anthropic’s own records of user requests and responses.
The plaintiffs claim that filters Anthropic introduced after music publishers first sued it in October 2023 “cover only a narrow subset of commercially prominent songs and are readily circumvented by rephrasing the prompt.”
According to the complaint, Claude Haiku 4.5 and Sonnet 5 will tell users they cannot reproduce song lyrics because of copyright restrictions, but the models “have no problem creating derivative works based upon those copyrighted lyrics.”
In a section arguing that fair use does not apply, the complaint cites a July post on X in which Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, alleged that Chinese company Moonshot AI had distilled Anthropic’s Fable model to develop Kimi K3. Distillation involves training one AI model on the outputs of another.
“All irony aside, Anthropic built its AI model on stolen copyrighted information … Anthropic cried foul,” the filing states.
It then quotes Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s Head of Public Policy, who wrote, in part, in a reply to Kratsios on X: “Illicit, adversarial distillation is IP theft and industrial espionage that supports adversary military and intelligence capabilities. It is a national challenge that creates serious national security risks for the United States and democratic allies.
“We’ll continue to crack down on it and work with the Administration and Congress to maintain American AI leadership.”
MBW has contacted Anthropic for comment.
In 2022, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with Authentic Brands Group and ABG EPE IP when co-writer Hugo Peretti’s heirs tried to terminate a 1983 transfer of renewal rights in Can’t Help Falling in Love. The Peretti family had made that transfer to Julian and Jean Aberbach, whom the court described as ABG’s predecessors-in-interest.
The plaintiffs are represented by Richard S. Busch of Adams & Reese, who won the Blurred Lines case for Marvin Gaye’s family while at King & Ballow.
His team also filed a lawsuit against Anthropic for Reservoir on October 21.
Reservoir’s complaint against Anthropic used the same “infringe now, and hope for a two-trillion-dollar IPO later” line.
UMPG, Concord, and ABKCO sued Anthropic in October 2023 over roughly 500 songs, and filed a second suit in January 2026 covering more than 20,000 works.
BMG sued in March 2026 over 493 compositions, and Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music followed on August 28.
In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to a USD $1.5 billion settlement with book authors who had sued over its use of pirated books.Music Business Worldwide
