Elvis Presley Estate Sues Anthropic for 274 Songs’ Copyright Infringement

Authentic Brands Group and the estate of Elvis Presley filed a federal lawsuit on October 23, 2026, accusing artificial intelligence company Anthropic of training its Claude models on 274 copyrighted songs without permission. The legal action, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California under case number 5:26-cv-12473, marks a major escalation as one of the first instances where an individual artist’s estate has brought direct copyright claims against a major AI firm.

Authentic Brands Group Files $48 Million Lawsuit Over 274 Presley Songs

The complaint targets an extensive catalog of the singer’s recorded works, ranging from major global hits such as Can’t Help Falling in Love, Don’t Be Cruel, All Shook Up, and A Little Less Conversation to lesser-known tracks. According to aichatdaily.com, the plaintiffs include ABG EPE IP LLC alongside Abilene Music, Raleigh Music Publishing, trusts tied to the Aberbach family, and the Luigi Creatore Trust.

The legal filing outlines three specific counts against Anthropic: direct copyright infringement, circumvention of technological protection measures under Section 1201 of Title 17, and the removal or alteration of copyright management information under Section 1202. Lead attorney Richard Busch argued in court documents that Anthropic has built its entire business model on large-scale copyright infringement.

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.Richard Busch

Dataset Scraping and Claude Output Allegations

The lawsuit details how Anthropic allegedly acquired the protected lyrics, pointing to web scraping of lyrics sites and streaming metadata, large third-party datasets including Common Crawl, Books3, and the YouTube Subtitles subset of The Pile, as well as BitTorrent downloads from pirate libraries such as Library Genesis, PiLiMi, and Z-Library, aichatdaily.com reported.

The complaint names several specific iterations of the AI assistant, including Claude Opus 5, Sonnet 5, Fable 5, Mythos 5, Claude Haiku 4.5, and Claude 3 Opus. While noting that the system typically declines direct requests to output song lyrics, the lawsuit alleges that asking the model to rewrite the tracks for a modern audience yields problematic results.

The filing quotes the model itself admitting that the generated renders land very close to the originals, crossing the line from inspiration into reproducing copyrighted compositions.

Statutory Damages Sought in Northern District of California

The plaintiffs are pursuing a total of approximately $48.6 million in statutory damages across the three counts. This figure breaks down into $41.1 million for direct copyright infringement at $150,000 per willfully infringed track, $685,000 for technical circumvention violations at up to $2,500 per violation, and $6.85 million for credit-stripping under Section 1202 at up to $25,000 per violation.

In addition to financial compensation, the legal action demands a permanent injunction, a jury trial, an accounting of all training data and scraping activities involving the songs, and the complete destruction of unlicensed copies held within model weights. Anthropic had not publicly responded to the complaint as of Saturday, though the company previously stated in response to related litigation from Reservoir Media that it disagrees with the allegations and intends to defend itself vigorously.

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