Elvis Presley rightsholders sue Anthropic for more than $48.6M over 274 song lyrics

Another set of music rightsholders has taken Anthropic to court. According to Music Business Worldwide, a suit filed on 23 October in the US District Court for the Northern District of California claims Anthropic copied the lyrics of 274 songs Elvis Presley recorded to train its Claude models, without a licence or payment. (Anthropic makes Claude. We report on it the way we would any other AI company.)

Who is suing, and over what?

The lead plaintiff is ABG EPE IP LLC, part of Authentic Brands Group, which controls Presley's name and likeness and holds a share of the publishing on songs he recorded. Raleigh Music Publishing, Abilene Music, Jason Simeon Aberbach and trusts tied to the Aberbach family and to Luigi Creatore, a co-writer of Can't Help Falling in Love, have joined it, MBW reports. The songs named include All Shook Up, Don't Be Cruel, A Little Less Conversation and Return to Sender.

There are three main claims:

• Copyright infringement. Training on the lyrics, and Claude's output of copies and derivative works.
• Circumvention. Scraping tools allegedly got past logins, paywalls and bot detection on licensed lyrics and streaming sites.
• Stripped credits. Anthropic allegedly removed song titles, songwriter credits and publisher details before training. The complaint says it chose the Newspaper text-extraction tool over jusText because jusText kept copyright notices.

Where does $48.6M come from?

Arithmetic on statutory maximums. Per MBW, 274 works at up to $150,000 each for wilful infringement comes to $41.1M. The circumvention count adds $685,000 and the credits count $6.85M. The plaintiffs also want actual damages or profits, an injunction, and destruction of infringing copies, including in training datasets and model weights.

The evidence is thinner than the number suggests. MBW notes the complaint shows no example of Claude reproducing a Presley lyric. It alleges infringing output "on information and belief" and leans on a Claude rewrite example from the Round Hill Music suit, which didn't involve a Presley song. Anthropic told MBW: "We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully."

Part of a pattern

This is the same legal team behind the Round Hill Music suit (17 August) and the Reservoir suit (21 October), according to MBW. UMPG, Concord and ABKCO sued in October 2023 over about 500 songs and again in January 2026 over more than 20,000 works, BMG sued in March over 493 compositions, and Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed in August. The complaint also draws on Bartz v. Anthropic, the authors' case Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion in September 2025. For how these cases fit together, see our AI music lawsuits explainer.

Our call

We think the headline figure is the least important part. Statutory maximums are a ceiling, not a forecast, and the complaint admits it has no Presley-specific output to show. The infringement count will probably rise or fall with the bigger publisher cases and the fair-use questions they raise.

The credit-stripping claim is different. If a court accepts that choosing an extractor that drops copyright notices counts as removing copyright management information, that standard reaches every AI company that scrapes the web, not just this one. For songwriters, whose credits already go missing across the streaming chain, that would be a real lever. It is also the easiest claim to test against the facts, so watch for it at the motion-to-dismiss stage.

The broader read: suing one catalogue at a time, with a template complaint, keeps the pressure on and builds leverage for licensing talks. Whether those talks end in settlements, or in a ruling that settles the training question, is still open.