The owners of Elvis Presley’s music have sued Anthropic, accusing it of using 274 songs by the legendary singer to train its Claude AI models without permission. The rights holders are seeking USD 48.6 million in damages, alleging copyright infringement and unauthorized retention of copyrighted material.
The lawsuit was filed on Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. According to The Independent, a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group, which acquired Elvis Presley’s intellectual property and trademark rights in 2013, is among the plaintiffs.
The complaint alleges that Anthropic copied songs including ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love,’ ‘All Shook Up,’ ‘Don’t Be Cruel,’ ‘A Little Less Conversation’ and ‘Return to Sender’ without permission and used them to train its Claude AI models.
Other plaintiffs include music publishers Raleigh Music Publishing and Abilene Music; 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 Presley recorded.
The rights holders allege that Anthropic collected copyrighted lyrics from across the internet, including through web-crawl archives and datasets, and retained copies in an internal repository for training future versions of Claude. They argue that storing the material in this central library itself constituted copyright infringement, separate from its use in AI training.
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The complaint further alleges that the company removed identifying copyright information from the works and that Claude can reproduce copyrighted material despite safeguards introduced after music publishers sued Anthropic over song lyrics in 2023.
According to the complaint, when asked to recreate songs for a modern audience, Claude generated versions with similar structures, reused hooks with minor wording changes, and complete verses, choruses, and bridges.
“We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully,” Anthropic told NBC News.
The plaintiffs seek up to USD 41.1 million in copyright infringement damages, calculated at USD 150,000 per song for the 274 songs. They also seek USD 685,000 for alleged circumvention of copyright protections and USD 6.85 million for the alleged removal of copyright information.
The complaint seeks a permanent injunction to prevent further infringement and an order requiring Anthropic to destroy unauthorized copies of the copyrighted works.
The case adds to Anthropic’s growing legal challenges over copyrighted material used to train AI systems. In January 2026, Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO Music expanded their lawsuit against the company, seeking more than USD 3 billion over alleged infringement involving more than 20,000 works.
Anthropic also agreed to a USD 1.5 billion settlement in a separate lawsuit brought by authors over the use of pirated books to train Claude.