Elvis Presley's Owners Sue Anthropic for $41 Million, Saying Claude Was Built on Copyright Theft From Day One

The people who own Elvis Presley's music want Anthropic to pay for every song they say Claude learned from. On Friday, the rights holders sued the AI company over 274 Presley songs, asking for about $41 million and a court order to destroy every unauthorized copy.

The lawsuit was brought by Authentic Brands Group, the licensing company that controls Presley's music and likeness, together with other companies, trusts and individuals who hold rights to his catalog, NBC News reports. Billboard broke the story first.

All Shook Up, and 273 more

The complaint says Anthropic used the lyrics without a license or payment to train Claude, and that the model then generated infringing versions. The songs named 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 filing, the alleged infringement ran through "the entire development" of Claude and continues every time a user gets the chatbot to reproduce lyrics or produce an unauthorized adaptation. The complaint goes further than any single song, saying Anthropic "built its entire business model on infringing copyrights at an unfathomable scale."

Lead attorney Richard Busch put it bluntly in the filing: "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."

The plaintiffs also go after Anthropic's safety story. "Even after the Defendant supposedly put up 'guardrails' after being sued, in one of its latest iterations, Claude continues to infringe," the complaint says. When Claude was recently asked to re-create specific songs "for a modern audience," it did, and the results, the filing claims, "keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges." The complaint also points to alleged mass scraping and pirating of books.

The bill

The ask is $41.1 million in statutory damages, which works out to the legal maximum of $150,000 for each of the 274 works the plaintiffs say were willfully infringed. They also want a permanent injunction and the destruction of all unauthorized copies.

Anthropic's response was short. "We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully," a spokesperson said.

A crowded docket

Anthropic has been here before. Last year it agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle with authors over pirated books, the largest settlement in US copyright history. In January, Universal Music, Concord and ABKCO expanded their lyrics suit against the company, and BMG, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed similar suits this year. Independent publisher Round Hill, also represented by Busch, and Reservoir Media have recently sued both Anthropic and Suno.

What makes the Presley case stand out is who is suing. The Guardian calls it one of the first major challenges brought directly by an artist's estate against an AI developer, one that could set a precedent for how AI companies are allowed to use music catalogs.

The music industry is fighting AI on more than one front. Spotify said last week that over the past year it removed about 50 million songs it considered AI slop from its recommendations. For the estate of the most famous rock star in history, the question is simpler: who gets paid when a machine learns the songs.

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