Elvis Song Owners Sue Anthropic for $41.1M Over 274 Songs

The owners of 274 songs Elvis Presley recorded are suing Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, for up to $41.1 million. They say Claude learned the lyrics without permission and can still reproduce them when asked.

The complaint was filed on October 23 in federal court in San Jose, California, under case number 5:26-cv-12473. The plaintiffs are music companies, trusts and individuals led by ABG EPE IP LLC, which the Guardian reports is part of Authentic Brands Group, the licensing firm that controls Presley’s music and likeness. Songs named include “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, “All Shook Up” and “Don’t Be Cruel”.

Where the $41.1 million comes from

The number is simple arithmetic. US copyright law lets a court award up to $150,000 per work when infringement is found to be wilful. Multiply that by 274 songs and you get $41.1 million, the maximum the complaint asks for.

The plaintiffs add two smaller claims: $685,000 for allegedly getting around the protections on licensed lyrics sites, and $6.85 million for allegedly stripping out copyright information, the credits that say who owns a song. Together that comes to about $48.6 million. These are requests, not findings. No court has ruled on any of it.

What they say Claude did

AI chatbots learn by reading huge amounts of text. The complaint says Anthropic’s training data included lyrics scraped from the web through public collections such as Common Crawl and The Pile.

It also says Anthropic’s filters, the “guardrails” meant to stop Claude reciting lyrics, do not work. As evidence, it quotes Claude itself, after being asked to rewrite songs “for a modern audience”: “These renders keep landing very close to the originals.”

Why it matters

This is Anthropic’s second music lawsuit in the same week. The same lawyer, Richard Busch, filed a complaint for Reservoir Media on October 21 covering 853 songs. A suit by music publishers led by Concord, first filed in 2023, is still running.

For anyone who uses Claude, nothing changes today. The plain reading: the music industry is now pricing AI training song by song, at the legal maximum. The figure to watch is what a court, or a settlement, says each song is actually worth.