The owners of Elvis Presley’s music have sued Anthropic, accusing the AI company behind the Claude chatbot of using 274 of Presley’s songs to train its models without permission or payment.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks more than $41 million in damages—$150,000 per song—and a jury trial. The plaintiffs include Authentic Brands Group, which controls Presley’s intellectual property, along with Raleigh Music Publishing, Abilene Music, and trusts linked to songwriter Luigi Creatore and the Aberbach family.
The songs named in the suit include some of Presley’s biggest hits: “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “All Shook Up,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “A Little Less Conversation,” and “Return to Sender”.
The Allegations
“The Elvis Plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before,” the lawsuit states.
The complaint alleges that Anthropic copied the lyrics and used them to train Claude, and that the AI continues to generate infringing material today. It also accuses the company of circumventing measures used to protect the music and removing copyright management information from the songs.
The plaintiffs say that even after Anthropic added “guardrails” following earlier lawsuits, Claude still reproduces the songs. When recently asked to recreate specific tracks “for a modern audience,” Claude did so and acknowledged the output “keep[s] landing very close to the originals,” according to the complaint.
Anthropic’s Response
A spokesperson for Anthropic said: “We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully”.
Anthropic has argued in other cases that training its models on copyrighted material is protected under fair use laws. The company is already facing similar lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and Reservoir Media.
Last year, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by authors who said the company used pirated books to train its AI models—the largest copyright recovery in US history.
The Broader Fight
The Presley lawsuit is the latest in a growing wave of copyright battles between AI developers and the music industry. The outcome could have significant implications for how copyrighted music—and creative works more broadly—are used to train AI models.
The plaintiffs are seeking a permanent injunction to prevent further infringement and an order requiring Anthropic to destroy all unauthorized copies of the songs, including those retained in training datasets and model weights.
The Bottom Line
The owners of Elvis Presley’s music have sued Anthropic for more than $41 million, alleging the AI company used 274 Presley songs to train Claude without permission. The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of building its business on “copyright infringement at a scale never seen before.” Anthropic says it disagrees and will defend itself. The case is part of a broader legal battle between the music industry and AI companies over the use of copyrighted works.
My Opinion
Anthropic has already paid $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit from authors whose books it used without permission. Now it is being sued again, this time by the owners of Elvis Presley’s music. The pattern is clear: AI companies built their models on other people’s work, and now they are paying the price.
Anthropic will argue fair use. It will say that training AI on copyrighted material is transformative, that the output is not the same as the input, that the law needs to catch up with the technology. Maybe a court will agree. But the Elvis lawsuit makes that argument harder. The complaint alleges that Claude did not just learn from the songs. It reproduced them. When asked to recreate specific tracks, it did so and admitted the output was “very close to the originals.”
The music industry has been fighting this fight for decades. First it was Napster. Then it was streaming. Now it is AI. The technology changes, but the principle remains the same: artists deserve to be paid for their work. If AI companies want to use Elvis Presley’s music to train their models, they should license it. If they do not, they should face the consequences.
