The owners of Elvis Presley’s music have sued Anthropic, accusing the company behind the Claude chatbot of using 274 of his songs to train its AI models without permission or payment. The lawsuit was filed on October 23 by a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group, which controls much of Presley’s intellectual property, together with other rights holders.
The complaint names some of Presley’s best-known hits, including Can’t Help Falling in Love, All Shook Up, Don’t Be Cruel, A Little Less Conversation and Return to Sender. It alleges that Anthropic used copyrighted compositions and lyrics in training and that Claude can generate unauthorised versions of existing songs. The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages of up to 150,000 dollars per song, about 41.1 million dollars in total.
Anthropic has not publicly responded to this lawsuit, but has previously argued that training on copyrighted material can be protected under US fair use law. The case also claims that Claude kept producing material close to the originals even after safeguards were added, including when asked to recreate songs for a modern audience.
The suit is part of a wider wave of music copyright cases against AI companies. Publishers including Universal Music Publishing, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic in 2023, and Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed a further case in August 2026. As AI music tools such as Suno and voice tools such as ElevenLabs grow more capable, courts are becoming the place where the rules for training data are being worked out, one catalogue at a time.
Source: NME
