Elvis Presley song rights holders sue Anthropic over 274 songs: what the lawsuit claims

The Elvis Presley lawsuit against Anthropic was filed on Friday, October 23, 2026, in federal court in California. It claims Anthropic copied 274 musical compositions recorded by Presley, including "Can't Help Falling in Love," "All Shook Up" and "Don't Be Cruel," to train Claude, and that Claude can still reproduce them. Headlines called it a suit by the Presley estate. The complaint itself names a company tied to Authentic Brands Group, two music publishers and several songwriters' trusts and heirs. Anthropic says it disagrees with the claims and will defend the case. It's at least the seventh music-publishing suit against Anthropic, which our Anthropic copyright roundup tracks.

This story is based on the complaint, ABG EPE IP LLC et al. v. Anthropic PBC, as posted by the docket tracker ChatGPT Is Eating the World, the court docket as indexed by CourtListener, the US Code's damages provisions, and reporting by Rolling Stone, NME and NBC News, checked October 26, 2026. Nothing here is legal advice, and the complaint's allegations haven't been proven.

The short version

• Who's suing: ABG EPE IP LLC, Raleigh Music Publishing LLC, Abilene Music LLC, the Luigi Creatore Trust, two Aberbach family trusts and Jason Simeon Aberbach.
• Where: US District Court for the Northern District of California, case 5:26-cv-12473, filed October 23, 2026, with a jury demand.
• What: 274 compositions, the songs as written (lyrics and music), not Presley's sound recordings.
• Claims: direct copyright infringement, circumvention of technological protection measures, and removal of copyright management information.
• Money: up to $41.1 million in statutory damages for willful infringement, plus up to $685,000 and $6.85 million under two Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims, by the complaint's own math.

Who filed the Elvis Presley lawsuit against Anthropic?

The complaint calls the plaintiffs "the Elvis Plaintiffs" and describes them as "independent music and entertainment companies, as well as trusts and individuals" that own or control rights in compositions "recorded by Elvis Presley." The lead plaintiff is ABG EPE IP LLC, a Tennessee company based in New York. Rolling Stone and NME describe it as part of Authentic Brands Group, which controls much of Presley's name, image and likeness. The complaint itself doesn't mention Authentic Brands.

The other plaintiffs are Raleigh Music Publishing LLC, Abilene Music LLC, the Luigi Creatore Trust, the Susan T. Aberbach Revocable Trust, the Decedents Exempt Trust and Jason Simeon Aberbach. The complaint refers to "heirs of the original writers" who rely on the songs' income. It covers compositions, not recordings, so the claim is about lyrics and melodies, not the master tapes.

The lawyers are Richard Busch and colleagues at Adams & Reese, with Skaggs Faucette. Busch, who represented Marvin Gaye's family in the "Blurred Lines" case, told Rolling Stone that Anthropic "has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before."

What does the complaint allege?

The 28-page complaint makes three kinds of allegation.

Training copies. It says Anthropic built its training data from sources including Common Crawl, The Pile and its "YouTube Subtitles" subset, Books3 and the Internet Archive, and that it downloaded the Library Genesis, PiLiMi and Z-Library collections through BitTorrent. Those piracy allegations lean on findings and filings from the authors' case, Bartz v. Anthropic, which settled for $1.5 billion.

Stripped copyright notices. It alleges Anthropic chose a text-extraction tool because it removed copyright notices more aggressively than an alternative. That underpins the claim under 17 U.S.C. § 1202.

Outputs. It says Claude produces verbatim or near-verbatim lyrics and "derivative" rewrites. It alleges output filters Anthropic added after the 2023 Concord lyrics case cover "only a narrow subset of commercially prominent songs" and can be avoided by rephrasing. As an example, it quotes Claude Sonnet 5, asked to rewrite songs "for a modern audience," saying its versions were "edging past 'inspired by' into reproducing the copyrighted song." The complaint says copies sit in every Claude model, naming Opus 5, Sonnet 5, Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

These are the plaintiffs' allegations. Anthropic hasn't filed a response in court, and a court hasn't tested any of them.

Where does the $41 million figure come from?

It's the maximum statutory damages, not a demand for a fixed sum. US copyright law lets an owner choose statutory damages per work instead of proving actual losses: $750 to $30,000 per work, or up to $150,000 if the court finds the infringement was willful. The complaint multiplies that ceiling by its 274 works.

The complaint also asks for a declaration of willfulness, a permanent injunction, an accounting of training data, and the impounding or destruction of infringing copies, including in "model weights." It pleads actual damages and profits as an alternative.

What has Anthropic said?

"We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully," an Anthropic spokesperson told NBC News on October 25, 2026. Anthropic hadn't filed anything in court as of October 26, and the docket showed no judge assigned yet. In the related lyrics case brought by Universal Music, Concord and ABKCO, Anthropic argues that training Claude is fair use, and Judge Eumi Lee heard summary judgment arguments on that question on October 21, 2026, without ruling, as our roundup reports. The Elvis complaint cites that case and a second Concord suit to argue Anthropic knew of the problem and kept going.

How does it fit with Anthropic's other copyright cases?

The suit joins the Concord cases, BMG, Round Hill, Sony Music Publishing with Warner Chappell, and Reservoir Media, which sued on October 21, 2026, all brought by music companies and all now in federal court in California, plus the Canadian news publishers' claim in Ontario. ChatGPT Is Eating the World, which tracks AI copyright dockets, counted it as the 157th copyright suit against AI companies and described it as the eighth AI music copyright suit of 2026. The timing matters for Anthropic's finances too: what its draft IPO prospectus reportedly says is covered in our prospectus analysis. For the broader question of what Anthropic builds and how it's structured, see our Anthropic explainer.

What's confirmed, reported and uncertain

• Confirmed (the complaint): the court and case number, filing date, plaintiffs, the three causes of action, 274 works, the damages calculations, the jury demand and the quoted Claude output.
• Reported: ABG EPE IP's link to Authentic Brands Group and Busch's quotes (Rolling Stone, NME); Anthropic's statement (NBC News).
• Uncertain: which judge will hear it, and whether the case will be related to the other music suits before Judge Lee; whether the complaint's Exhibit A list, which wasn't in the posted copy, matches the 274 count; and how Lee's pending fair use ruling in Concord will bear on it.