Anthropic Elvis Presley Copyright Lawsuit, 274 Songs and Up to $48.6 Million at Stake

The companies, trusts and individuals that own or control copyright rights in 274 musical compositions associated with Elvis Presley have sued Anthropic, accusing the artificial-intelligence company of using the songs to train its Claude AI models without permission or payment.

The lawsuit, filed on October 23, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Anthropic copied copyrighted lyrics, retained unauthorized copies in an internal library, used the material in AI training, and generated responses that reproduced or closely adapted protected lyrics. The plaintiffs also allege that Anthropic circumvented technological restrictions used by licensed lyrics platforms and removed or altered copyright-management information.

The case is ABG EPE IP LLC et al. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-12473. The plaintiffs include an entity associated with Authentic Brands Group (ABG), which controls important Elvis Presley intellectual-property rights, along with music-publishing companies, trusts and individuals.

The plaintiffs seek up to $41.1 million in statutory copyright damages, plus separate statutory damages under two federal digital-copyright claims. The three requested figures total approximately $48.635 million. No damages have been awarded, and no court has ruled that Anthropic infringed the copyrights.

Anthropic disputed the allegations and said it intends to defend the case, according to press reports published on October 25. The allegations below are claims made in a complaint. They have not been proven.

Anthropic Elvis Presley Lawsuit: Quick Facts

Detail	Information
Case name	ABG EPE IP LLC et al. v. Anthropic PBC
Case number	5:26-cv-12473
Court	U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California
Filing date	October 23, 2026
Defendant	Anthropic PBC
Main rights holder identified in coverage	ABG EPE IP LLC, associated with Authentic Brands Group
Other plaintiffs	Music companies, trusts and individuals that claim rights in the compositions
Works at issue	274 musical compositions recorded by Elvis Presley
Example songs	“Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “All Shook Up,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Return To Sender” and “A Little Less Conversation”
AI product	Claude
Main legal claim	Direct copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. § 501)
Other claims	Circumvention of technological protection measures (§ 1201) and removal or alteration of copyright-management information (§ 1202)
Main statutory damages request	Up to $41.1 million
Additional requested statutory damages	$685,000 and $6.85 million under the two DMCA claims
Combined requested figures	Approximately $48.635 million
Anthropic’s response	The company disputes the claims and says it will defend itself
Current status	Newly filed; no merits ruling or damages award identified
Official settlement website	None. No settlement exists
Consumer claim form	None. No public claim form exists

These figures describe the relief requested in the complaint. They are not a judgment, a settlement offer or a prediction of what a court or jury would award.

Who Filed the Elvis Presley Copyright Lawsuit?

The lawsuit was brought by seven named plaintiff parties:

1. ABG EPE IP LLC.
2. The Luigi Creatore Trust, with Claire Creatore and Stephen Chapman as trustees.
3. The Susan T. Aberbach Revocable Trust, with Susan T. Aberbach as trustee.
4. The Decedents Exempt Trust created under the Anne-Rachel Aberbach Family Trust, with Steven Lee as trustee.
5. Jason Simeon Aberbach.
6. Abilene Music LLC.
7. Raleigh Music Publishing LLC.

Collectively, the complaint refers to them as the Elvis plaintiffs. They allege that they own or exclusively control copyright interests, including licensing rights, in the 274 compositions listed in the complaint’s Exhibit A, whether directly or through arrangements with songwriters, artists and other copyright owners.

Authentic Brands Group is known for managing and licensing intellectual property associated with Elvis Presley. But this is not a claim by one company over every Elvis recording. The other plaintiffs assert their own rights in the compositions at issue, and the copyright in a song’s underlying composition and lyrics can be separate from the copyright in a particular sound recording.

The case concerns alleged unauthorized use of musical compositions and lyrics. It should not be described as a lawsuit over every Elvis master recording, a cloned Elvis voice or an unauthorized Elvis impersonation.

Which Elvis Presley Songs Are Named in the Lawsuit?

The complaint identifies 274 copyrighted musical compositions in Exhibit A. Examples named in the filing include:

• “All Shook Up”
• “Can’t Help Falling in Love”
• “If I Can Dream”
• “Don’t Be Cruel”
• “A Little Less Conversation”
• “Return To Sender”
• “(You’re The) Devil in Disguise”

These titles are examples, not the complete list. Presley did not write every song he recorded, and the lawsuit does not suggest that he personally wrote all 274 works. The plaintiffs’ position is that they own or control the relevant copyright interests and the exclusive right to authorize the uses those copyrights cover. The full list appears in the filed complaint.

What Does the Lawsuit Accuse Anthropic of Doing?

The complaint describes two connected stages: what allegedly happened to the songs while Claude was being built, and what Claude allegedly produces for users. It does not focus only on whether Claude can reproduce lyrics on request.

Stage 1: Copying, retaining and training on lyrics

The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic obtained copyrighted lyrics through web scraping and third-party datasets without licenses from the rights holders. They describe lyrics appearing on licensed websites and argue that the text was collected and used without authorization.

They also allege that Anthropic placed the copied material into a permanent, general-purpose internal repository meant to be retained for future use, and that the material was copied again during data cleaning, tokenization, encoding and successive rounds of model training. They argue that maintaining such a library is legally different from making a copy solely for one training process.

This raises a central question in AI copyright litigation: whether copying protected material to assemble a training dataset is infringement or falls within an exception such as fair use. The answer is not automatically the same for every work, dataset or use. A court would have to evaluate the alleged copying, its purpose and circumstances, and any defenses.

Stage 2: Outputs that reproduce or adapt lyrics

The plaintiffs also allege that Claude has produced responses containing verbatim or near-verbatim lyrics and material that closely resembles copyrighted compositions. According to the complaint, users could ask Claude to recreate songs for a modern audience or to create adaptations or mashups that incorporated protected expression.

The training question and the output question are not necessarily governed by the same facts. The rights holders allege that both stages create liability. The complaint’s descriptions of Claude’s outputs are allegations, not findings by a judge.

Why Do the Plaintiffs Say Anthropic’s Safeguards Were Not Enough?

The complaint alleges that Anthropic introduced safeguards intended to reduce the generation of copyrighted lyrics after earlier litigation, but that those protections were ineffective. The plaintiffs contend that users could change their prompts or request songs in ways that still produced protected lyrics or close adaptations.

Their argument is that an AI company should not avoid liability merely by adding filters if the overall system continues to reproduce copyrighted material in ways that violate copyright law.

Anthropic has not admitted these allegations. A court may need to examine how Claude’s safeguards operate, what the models actually produced in the cited examples, and whether any outputs reproduce protected expression in a legally actionable way. It would be inaccurate to say the lawsuit has already proved the safeguards failed or that Anthropic deliberately designed Claude to infringe the 274 works.

What Are the Three Legal Claims Against Anthropic?

The complaint asserts three causes of action under federal copyright law and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

1. Direct copyright infringement

The first claim alleges direct infringement under the Copyright Act, including unauthorized reproduction and preparation of derivative works. Under 17 U.S.C. § 106, copyright owners generally hold the exclusive rights to reproduce their works and prepare derivative works, subject to limits and exceptions elsewhere in the statute. Section 501 provides for infringement liability when someone violates those exclusive rights.

The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic copied protected lyrics, retained copies, used them in training and generated infringing outputs without authorization. Anthropic can contest whether the alleged conduct infringed and whether any exception protects some or all of the challenged uses.

2. Circumvention of technological protection measures

The second claim invokes 17 U.S.C. § 1201, a DMCA provision addressing circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. The plaintiffs allege that licensed lyrics platforms used access controls such as authentication, subscription restrictions, bot detection and rate limits, and that Anthropic, directly or through automated tools or third-party services, circumvented them.

This is a separate theory from ordinary infringement. It concerns whether access controls were circumvented in a way the statute prohibits, not simply whether lyrics later appeared in an output. The existence of a subscription wall or automated data collection does not by itself establish a violation, and a court would have to assess the technology, the conduct and the statutory requirements.

3. Removal or alteration of copyright-management information

The third claim invokes 17 U.S.C. § 1202, which addresses specified conduct involving copyright-management information (CMI). CMI can include information identifying a work, its author, its copyright owner or licensing terms, as the statute defines it.

The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic removed or altered information such as song titles, songwriter credits and publisher identification during data processing, and that copies were distributed or used with that information removed. A § 1202 claim requires proof of particular statutory elements, including knowledge and intent requirements, so missing metadata alone is not enough. No court has determined that Anthropic violated this provision.

How Much Money Is Anthropic Being Asked to Pay?

Claim	Statutory basis	Amount requested
Direct copyright infringement	17 U.S.C. § 504(c)	Up to $41,100,000
Circumvention of technological measures	17 U.S.C. § 1201 and § 1203	$685,000
Removal or alteration of copyright-management information	17 U.S.C. § 1202 and § 1203	$6,850,000
Combined requested figures	Three pleaded claims	$48,635,000

The main request seeks up to $150,000 for each of the 274 works, the statutory maximum for willful infringement. The two DMCA figures use the per-work amounts requested under their respective counts. The combined $48.635 million is what the complaint asks for. It is not an amount a court has found Anthropic owes, and it is not a prediction that the plaintiffs will recover every dollar.

Why is the main claim calculated at $150,000 per song?

Under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c), statutory damages generally range from $750 to $30,000 per work, as the court considers just. If the copyright owner proves willful infringement and the court so finds, the maximum can rise to $150,000 per work. The plaintiffs allege willfulness, arguing that Anthropic knew it was copying copyrighted material without permission and kept using it.

Anthropic disputes the claims. The $150,000 maximum is not automatic. The court must determine liability and the proper damages under the statute.

What Else Are the Plaintiffs Asking the Court to Do?

The lawsuit seeks more than money. The plaintiffs request declarations that Anthropic infringed their copyrights and violated the cited DMCA provisions, and a permanent injunction against further infringement of the works.

They also ask for an order directing Anthropic to surrender copies for impoundment or destruction, including alleged unauthorized copies in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights and server infrastructure. Further requests include an accounting, attorneys’ fees, court costs and a jury trial.

These are requests in a complaint. No court order requiring Anthropic to delete model weights, destroy training data, pay compensation or stop operating Claude was identified in the materials reviewed. Whether any such order could be granted, and its scope, would depend on the claims proved and the remedies federal law allows.

Can Anthropic Argue That Training AI on Lyrics Is Fair Use?

Yes. Fair use is likely to be a central legal question, although Anthropic’s exact defenses in this newly filed case will become clearer as the litigation progresses. Section 107 of the Copyright Act directs courts to weigh four factors:

1. Purpose and character of the use: including whether it is commercial and whether it adds a different purpose or character.
2. Nature of the copyrighted work: the type of work and its relationship to copyright protection.
3. Amount and substantiality used: how much was copied and whether that amount was reasonable in context.
4. Market effect: whether the use affects the existing or potential market for the work.

No single factor decides the outcome. The likely clash of positions looks like this:

Likely defense position	Likely rights-holder response
Training can be transformative because a model learns language patterns and supports new tasks	A commercial AI product built on copyrighted catalogs competes with and can undermine licensing markets
Input and output are separate questions, and a model generates new text rather than reselling song files	Near-verbatim outputs suggest the model retained and can redistribute protected expression
Trace use of lyrics is a small part of enormous training data	The works were copied in full, retained in a library and reused across training rounds

These are the arguments each side has made in comparable disputes, not a statement of how Anthropic will answer this complaint. In separate litigation brought by Universal Music Publishing Group and other publishers, the parties argued fair use at a hearing on October 21, 2026. Press reports said U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee did not issue a ruling at that hearing.

How other courts handle fair use in AI cases does not determine how this lawsuit will be resolved. The works, evidence, training practices, outputs and legal claims here must be assessed in this proceeding.

How Does This Lawsuit Differ From Anthropic’s $1.5 Billion Copyright Settlement?

The Elvis Presley case is separate from the Bartz et al. v. Anthropic PBC litigation over copyrighted books. In that case, Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement that received final approval in July 2026, covering eligible copyright owners whose books appear on the court-approved Works List.

The book settlement does not automatically include the 274 musical compositions in this case, and it does not create a payment right for anyone who simply used Claude or listened to Elvis’s music. It also is not a ruling that AI training on all copyrighted material is lawful. For the status of that separate settlement, see our update on the Anthropic $1.5 billion copyright settlement, claim deadline and payment status.

How Does the Case Compare With Other AI Music Copyright Lawsuits?

The Elvis Presley lawsuit arrives amid a broader wave of litigation over how AI systems use copyrighted music. Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO previously sued Anthropic over alleged use of copyrighted lyrics, and other publishers have brought disputes over lyrics and AI-generated music. Those cases involve different parties, works, allegations and procedural histories, so they are related in subject matter but are not the same lawsuit.

A dispute over AI-generated music and allegedly unauthorized recordings, such as the UMG Recordings and Sony Music v. Suno copyright lawsuit, concerns sound recordings. The Elvis complaint focuses on the compositions and lyrics listed in its exhibit, together with its allegations about copying, training, outputs, access controls and copyright-management information. An owner of a musical composition may hold rights different from the owner of a particular recording, so the outcome of one case does not automatically decide the other.

AI training disputes also extend beyond music. For a case about books and authors, see our coverage of the Meta AI copyright lawsuit over AI training.

Can Elvis Presley Fans or Claude Users Join the Lawsuit?

No. This is not a consumer class action, and it does not seek payments for people who bought albums, streamed songs or subscribed to Claude. It was filed by identified companies, trusts and individuals claiming ownership or control of copyright rights in specific compositions.

No public claim form, claims administrator or consumer settlement deadline was identified as of October 26, 2026. Merely using Claude or listening to Elvis Presley music does not make someone part of the plaintiff group, and there is no basis to promise a payout to songwriters, fans, artists or AI users based on this filing.

A person who owns or controls music copyrights would need to evaluate their own rights, contracts, registrations and circumstances to understand what legal options may exist. Be careful with any site or message claiming to offer a payout from this case. To learn how to spot one, read our guide on how to verify a class action settlement is legitimate.

What Happens Next in the Anthropic Elvis Lawsuit?

The lawsuit is very new. Likely next steps include a response from Anthropic, motions challenging the complaint, scheduling orders and discovery. Several issues are likely to matter:

Ownership and licensing. The plaintiffs must establish their rights in the works and their basis for bringing the claims.

Training and copying evidence. The parties may dispute how the material was obtained, retained, processed and used.

Claude’s outputs. The parties may examine the responses cited in the complaint and whether they reproduce protected expression.

Fair use and other defenses. Anthropic may challenge the claims on fair use or other grounds. None of these questions has been decided in this action.

The DMCA claims. The parties may dispute whether the alleged access restrictions and handling of copyright-management information meet the separate statutory requirements.

Damages and injunctive relief. If liability is established, the court must decide which remedies are legally available and supported by the evidence.

The case could help clarify the legal risks for AI systems that process copyrighted lyrics and generate material resembling existing songs. But filing a complaint does not change copyright law or establish that every form of AI training on protected works is illegal.

Key Takeaways

• Elvis Presley rights holders, including an entity associated with Authentic Brands Group, sued Anthropic on October 23, 2026, over 274 compositions.
• The plaintiffs seek up to $41.1 million on the main copyright claim and about $48.635 million across all three pleaded claims. Nothing has been awarded.
• The claims are direct copyright infringement, circumvention of access controls and removal or alteration of copyright-management information.
• Anthropic disputes the claims, and no court has ruled on liability or fair use in this case.
• There is no settlement, claim form or consumer payout.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Anthropic being sued over Elvis Presley songs?

The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic copied lyrics from 274 musical compositions associated with Elvis Presley, used them to train Claude without permission, and generated responses that reproduced or adapted protected expression. They also allege circumvention of access controls and removal or alteration of copyright-management information.

When was the Anthropic Elvis Presley lawsuit filed?

The complaint was filed on October 23, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

What is the case number?

The case is ABG EPE IP LLC et al. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-12473.

How much is Anthropic being sued for?

The plaintiffs seek up to $41.1 million in statutory copyright damages, plus $685,000 and $6.85 million under the two DMCA claims. The combined requested figures total approximately $48.635 million. None of it has been awarded.

Which songs are included?

Examples listed in the complaint include “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “All Shook Up,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Return To Sender,” “A Little Less Conversation,” “If I Can Dream” and “(You’re The) Devil in Disguise.” The complaint identifies 274 works in total.

Did Anthropic admit copyright infringement?

No. Press reports on October 25 said an Anthropic spokesperson disagreed with the claims and intended to defend the case fully.

Has a judge ruled that Anthropic violated the law?

No merits ruling in this lawsuit was identified as of October 26, 2026. The allegations have not been proven in court.

Is this a lawsuit over an AI-generated Elvis voice?

No. The complaint focuses on copyrights in musical compositions and lyrics, plus related allegations about access controls and copyright-management information. It is not a voice-cloning case or a claim over every Elvis sound recording.

Can Anthropic rely on fair use?

Anthropic can raise applicable defenses, potentially including fair use, based on the facts and arguments presented. Courts weigh the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the work, the amount used and the effect on the potential market. No fair-use ruling has been made in this case.

Does the $1.5 billion Anthropic book settlement cover the Elvis songs?

No automatic coverage was identified. The book settlement concerns eligible works on its court-approved list and does not create a claim process for the 274 compositions in this separate lawsuit.

Can I file a claim or receive settlement money?

No. No public claim form, class settlement or consumer payout process was identified. This is an action by specific copyright claimants, not a public claims program.

Could the lawsuit force Anthropic to remove training data?

The plaintiffs are asking for injunctive relief and for impoundment or destruction of unauthorized copies, including copies allegedly held in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights and server infrastructure. That is a request, not an order imposed by the court.

Sources and Legal Authorities

1. Complaint, ABG EPE IP LLC et al. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-12473, filed October 23, 2026
2. Los Angeles Times: Elvis Presley Catalog Owners Sue Anthropic Alleging Copyright Infringement
3. The Guardian: Anthropic Sued for Allegedly Using 274 Elvis Presley Songs to Train AI Models
4. Reuters: Anthropic and Music Publishers Debate Fair Use in AI Copyright Case
5. 17 U.S.C. § 106: Exclusive Rights in Copyrighted Works
6. 17 U.S.C. § 107: Fair Use
7. 17 U.S.C. § 501: Infringement of Copyright
8. 17 U.S.C. § 504: Remedies for Infringement
9. 17 U.S.C. § 1201: Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems
10. 17 U.S.C. § 1202: Integrity of Copyright-Management Information
11. Anthropic Copyright Settlement: Official Settlement Website

Legal disclaimer: This article summarizes publicly available allegations and explains potentially relevant federal law. It does not establish infringement or liability and is not legal advice. All requested damages and injunctions remain subject to the court’s evaluation of the evidence, statutory requirements and any defenses. AllAboutLawyer.com is an information site and is not a law firm.