Elvis Presley's rights holders sue Anthropic over 274 songs
The companies and trusts that control Elvis Presley's music sued AI company Anthropic on Friday, saying it copied 274 of his songs, including "Can't Help Falling in Love" and "Don't Be Cruel," to train its Claude models. Led by Authentic Brands Group, the plaintiffs seek $41.1 million, the maximum $150,000 per work for willful infringement, plus an order to destroy the copies. Anthropic said it disagrees and will defend the case. It joins a growing pile of music-industry suits against AI firms.
AI-assisted · US Brief desk · Sources listed below
What happened
Authentic Brands Group, the licensing company that controls Elvis Presley's intellectual property, joined other companies, trusts and individuals that hold rights to his music in suing Anthropic in federal court on Friday, Oct. 23. The complaint says Anthropic copied 274 Presley songs, among them "All Shook Up," "Can't Help Falling in Love," "Don't Be Cruel," "A Little Less Conversation" and "Return to Sender," to train its Claude AI models without permission.
Why it matters
Presley's catalog is one of the most valuable in music, and the suit targets what Claude produces today, not just how it was trained. If courts award damages per song, the cost of using music catalogs without licenses could rise across the AI industry.
More context
What they want: The plaintiffs seek $41.1 million, which is the $150,000 statutory maximum per work for willful infringement multiplied across the 274 songs, along with a permanent injunction and destruction of the copies, NBC News reported.
From the complaint: The suit says the infringement ran through "the entire development" of Claude and continues as users generate outputs that reproduce lyrics or adapt the songs. It says that when Claude was recently asked to re-create specific songs "for a modern audience," it did so: "These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges." It also accuses Anthropic of having "built its entire business model on infringing copyrights at an unfathomable scale."
The two sides: "We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully," an Anthropic spokesperson said. Richard Busch, the plaintiffs' lead attorney, said Presley's rights holders are "highly protective of" his songs. Busch also represents independent publisher Round Hill, which, along with Reservoir Media, recently sued both Anthropic and AI music company Suno, NBC News reported.
Strongest case for each side: The rights holders argue that copying whole lyrics into a training set and letting a commercial product repeat them is plain infringement, and that statutory damages exist for exactly this. AI companies have generally argued in these cases that training is fair use because the model learns patterns rather than storing works for resale. Weak spot (plaintiffs): the $41.1 million figure assumes a court finds every one of the 274 infringements willful, which is the highest bar in the statute. Weak spot (Anthropic): fair-use defenses are harder to make when a model outputs near-verbatim text, which is what the complaint alleges.
Context: Anthropic agreed last year to a $1.5 billion settlement with authors who said it trained on pirated copies of their books, the largest in U.S. copyright history, NBC News reported. Universal Music, Concord and ABKCO expanded their lyrics lawsuit against Anthropic in January, and BMG, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed similar suits this year.
What's still unknown: Anthropic has not yet filed a formal response in court, and no hearing date has been reported. It is also not clear whether the plaintiffs tried to negotiate a license before suing.
3 listed sources
References listed by US Brief; a source count is not a verification score.
Editorial sourcing notes
Published Monday, Oct. 26. Details of the complaint are from NBC News, The Guardian and Billboard, which first reported the suit.
Like US Brief? You can support it with a tip.