The companies and trusts that own the rights to songs Elvis Presley made famous have sued Anthropic, alleging that the company copied the lyrics of 274 of those songs to train its Claude models without a license and that Claude still reproduces or reworks them for users. The complaint was filed on Oct. 23, 2026, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California as ABG EPE IP LLC v. Anthropic PBC, case No. 5:26-cv-12473. These are allegations. No court has ruled on them.
Anthropic disputes the claims. "We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully," a spokesperson told NBC News and the BBC.
Who is suing
The lead plaintiff is ABG EPE IP LLC, part of Authentic Brands Group, which NBC News describes as the licensing platform that controls Presley's intellectual property. The other plaintiffs named in the complaint are Raleigh Music Publishing, Abilene Music, Jason Simeon Aberbach, and trusts tied to the Aberbach family and to Luigi Creatore. The song list attached to the complaint names Creatore as one of the co-writers of "Can't Help Falling in Love."
The 274 works include "All Shook Up," "Can't Help Falling in Love," "Don't Be Cruel," "A Little Less Conversation" and "Return to Sender," according to the complaint.
What the complaint alleges
The complaint makes three kinds of claims.
- Copyright infringement. It says Anthropic copied the lyrics, including with automated scraping tools, into a "permanent, general-purpose central library" from which it picked training data for each new Claude model.
- Getting around protections. It says Anthropic's scraping got around logins, paywalls, bot detection and other barriers on licensed lyric and streaming sites.
- Removing credits. It says Anthropic stripped song titles, songwriter credits and publisher details, which the law calls copyright management information (CMI), from the lyrics before training.
The complaint also targets Claude's answers, not only its training. It says Anthropic added output filters ("guardrails") after music publishers first sued in October 2023. The plaintiffs claim those filters cover only a "narrow subset" of well-known songs and are easy to get around by rewording a prompt. They say Claude Haiku 4.5 and Sonnet 5 decline to print the actual lyrics but will still write new versions based on them. As an example, the complaint quotes a Claude reply to a request to recreate songs "for a modern audience," in which the model said its versions were "edging past 'inspired by' into reproducing the copyrighted song." The complaint alleges that Claude made that admission after creating unlicensed derivative works when asked to rewrite songs for "a modern audience," and for those outputs it cites, in a footnote, the Round Hill Music complaint against Anthropic, which discussed Claude's versions of "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls, "I Got You (I Feel Good)" by James Brown and "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler.
The filing also leans on Anthropic's own past cases. It cites rulings and filings from Bartz v. Anthropic, the authors' copyright case over books used to train Claude, and from the music publishers' cases led by Concord Music Group.
What the plaintiffs want
The complaint asks for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per song willfully infringed, which the complaint puts at $41.1 million for the 274 works. As an alternative, it asks for actual damages and Anthropic's profits.
The complaint also states totals for the two other counts: $6.85 million for removing CMI and $685,000 for circumvention. Together that is about $48.6 million. Those are the maximums the plaintiffs claim, not an amount a court has set.
The complaint also asks the court to:
- bar Anthropic from further infringing the works
- order Anthropic to hand over or destroy all unauthorized copies, "including copies retained in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure"
- order a complete accounting of training data, scraping and datasets involving the works
- award attorneys' fees, and hold a jury trial
The model weights request is the one to watch. Weights are the learned values that make up a trained model, so, as Music Business Worldwide points out, the demand would reach the Claude models themselves if a court granted it.
Why it matters
This is not Anthropic's first music lawsuit. The complaint lists three related cases already pending in the same court: two brought by Concord Music Group and its co-plaintiffs, and one brought by BMG Rights Management. It also cites a separate suit from Round Hill Music. The complaint's related-case list also includes suits from Sony Music Publishing and Reservoir Media. NBC News reports that Universal Music, Concord and ABKCO expanded their lyrics case against Anthropic in January 2026.
The timing also matters. Anthropic filed its public IPO paperwork on Oct. 26, which we covered in our S-1 explainer. The Elvis complaint names that context directly, calling Anthropic's business model "infringe now, and hope for a two-trillion-dollar IPO later." For a company heading toward public markets, the number of copyright cases over its training data and model outputs keeps growing.
For Claude users, nothing changes today. The case is at an early stage, and no court has ruled on any of its claims. For more on Claude behavior that has drawn outside scrutiny this month, see our posts on Claude pulling Georgia vote counts and Anthropic's review of the AISI cyber test.
Sources
- Complaint, ABG EPE IP LLC v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-12473 (N.D. Cal., filed Oct. 23, 2026)
- NBC News: Elvis Presley's rights holders sue Anthropic, saying it trained AI on his music
- BBC News: Owners of Elvis Presley music rights sue Anthropic for copyright violations
- Music Business Worldwide: Rightsholders behind Elvis Presley's hits sue Anthropic for more than $48.6M
