Politics and regulation·October 25, 2026, 19:06

Elvis heirs sue Anthropic over 274 songs

AI-generated from the sources listed.

According to sources, the Elvis Presley estate and several rights holders have sued AI company Anthropic. They allege that the company's AI model Claude was trained on Presley's music without permission.

Rights holders behind Elvis Presley's music have filed a lawsuit against AI company Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot. According to sources, the case was filed on October 23, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Everything that follows is the plaintiffs' allegations. No court has tested them.

What is the case about?

The case concerns 274 Elvis Presley songs, including "Can't Help Falling in Love" and "Don't Be Cruel." Lesser-known works are also included.

The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic used the music to train Claude without permission. Training an AI model means showing it enormous amounts of text and other material so that it learns to produce new responses.

According to the complaint, Anthropic obtained the content through web scraping (automatic collection from the internet), third-party datasets such as Common Crawl, Books3 and YouTube Subtitles, and pirate libraries. This, too, is the plaintiffs' allegation.

The plaintiffs also claim that Claude still produces responses that reproduce the songs' core structure, melodic hooks and verse construction, even though filters have been introduced. The complaint calls this "unlicensed derivative works."

Three counts and a multimillion-dollar demand

The complaint has three counts: direct copyright infringement, circumvention of technical protections (Section 1201) and removal of copyright management information (Section 1202).

The sources disagree on the size of the demand. One reports that roughly $41 million in statutory damages is being sought, equal to $150,000 per song, which is the maximum. The other cites a total demand of about $48.6 million: $41.1 million for direct infringement, $685,000 for circumvention of protections and $6.85 million for removal of copyright management information.

The sources also disagree on who is behind the suit. One names only Authentic Brands Group. The other also names the Elvis Presley estate, ABG EPE IP LLC, Abilene Music, Raleigh Music Publishing, trusts affiliated with the Aberbach family and the Luigi Creatore Trust.

Lead counsel for the plaintiffs is Richard Busch, who previously represented the estate of Marvin Gaye in the "Blurred Lines" case.

A test case?

The music outlet Hit Channel describes the case as a test case for whether AI developers must have licensing agreements with administrators of older music catalogs. That is the outlet's own interpretation.

How Anthropic responds is unclear. One source cites no reaction, and the other reports that there was no public statement.