Elvis Presley's music rights holders sued Anthropic on Friday, October 23, alleging the company copied the lyrics of 274 Presley songs to train its Claude models without permission. The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, covers songs including "Can't Help Falling in Love," "Don't Be Cruel," "All Shook Up" and "A Little Less Conversation."
The lead plaintiff is ABG EPE IP LLC, a unit of Authentic Brands Group. It is joined by Abilene Music, Raleigh Music Publishing, trusts tied to the Aberbach family, and the Luigi Creatore Trust, which represents a co-writer of "Can't Help Falling in Love." The case is ABG EPE IP LLC et al. v. Anthropic PBC, number 5:26-cv-12473.
The complaint brings three counts: direct copyright infringement, circumvention of technological protection measures under 17 U.S.C. § 1201, and removal or alteration of copyright management information under § 1202. The last two go beyond the training question. The plaintiffs allege access controls were bypassed to collect the lyrics and that song titles and writer credits were stripped out during data cleaning.
Key facts
- 01Elvis Presley rights holders sued Anthropic on Oct. 23 in the Northern District of California over 274 songs.
- 02The complaint puts statutory damages at about $48.6M across infringement, Section 1201 and Section 1202 counts.
- 03Plaintiffs allege the lyrics reached Claude via Common Crawl, The Pile and pirate libraries such as Library Genesis.
- 04The suit asks for destruction of unlicensed copies, including in model weights, plus an accounting of training data.
- 05Anthropic had not publicly responded as of Saturday; lead attorney Richard Busch also filed Reservoir Media's suit this week.
On damages, the plaintiffs seek up to $150,000 per willfully infringed song, which the complaint totals at $41.1 million. They add $685,000 for the circumvention claim, at up to $2,500 per violation, and $6.85 million for the credit-stripping claim, at up to $25,000 per violation, for a combined figure of roughly $48.6 million. They also want a permanent injunction, a jury trial, and an accounting of Anthropic's training data and scraping activity involving the songs.
The complaint lays out several alleged routes by which the lyrics reached Anthropic: web scraping of lyrics sites and streaming-platform metadata, large third-party datasets including Common Crawl, Books3 and The Pile's YouTube Subtitles subset, copies from the Internet Archive, and BitTorrent downloads of pirate libraries such as Library Genesis, PiLiMi and Z-Library. For the pirated-library allegation, the filing leans on findings from Bartz v. Anthropic.
The plaintiffs name Claude Opus 5, Sonnet 5, Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as models that allegedly contain copies of the works, and also reference Claude Haiku 4.5 and Claude 3 Opus. They acknowledge Claude declines to print song lyrics, but allege that when asked to rewrite the songs for a modern audience it returned versions that keep the original structure and hooks with light rewording. The complaint asserts infringing output for all 274 songs without giving an example for each one.
Richard Busch of Adams and Reese is lead attorney for the plaintiffs. The complaint describes Anthropic's business as built on infringement "at a scale never seen before." Busch also filed Reservoir Media's suits against Anthropic and Suno earlier in the week, and the Elvis complaint follows the same template.
“The Elvis Plaintiffs are deeply protective of these iconic songs”— Richard Busch, Lead attorney for the Elvis plaintiffs
Anthropic had not publicly responded to the Elvis complaint as of Saturday. In the Reservoir case, the company said, "We disagree with the allegations and intend to defend this case vigorously." Everything in the complaint is an allegation at this stage, and no court has ruled on any of the claims.
The filing adds to a growing docket. At least six lyrics suits against Anthropic are now pending in the same federal court, and Anthropic agreed in 2025 to pay $1.5 billion to settle Bartz.
The remedies section is where the case reaches past money. The plaintiffs ask the court to order unlicensed copies of the songs impounded or destroyed wherever they sit, including in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights and servers.
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