Law360 (October 26, 2026, 2:29 PM EDT) -- Owners of copyrights in 274 songs recorded by Elvis Presley have sued Anthropic for nearly $50 million, alleging the artificial intelligence company used their lyrics for training data, stripped identifying information and enabled its chatbot Claude to generate infringing material.

The complaint filed Friday in California federal court asserts claims involving some of Presley's most famous songs, including "All Shook Up," "Don't Be Cruel" and "Return to Sender." The plaintiffs said Anthropic's alleged conduct undermines a licensing system that compensates publishers, songwriters and their heirs for the use of the compositions.

"U.S. copyright law simply does not let technology platforms like Anthropic ride roughshod over these Constitutionally mandated protections of creative expression," the plaintiffs said in the complaint. They include ABG EPE IP LLC, Raleigh Music Publishing, Abilene Music LLC, several trusts and individual rights holders.

Anthropic said in a statement through a spokesperson that it would fight the case.

"We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully," the statement said.

The plaintiffs allege Anthropic bypassed access controls to obtain the lyrics and stripped away information identifying the songs, writers and copyright owners. The lawsuit asserts direct copyright infringement and two claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and seeks up to $41.1 million for willful infringement, $685,000 for circumventing access controls and $6.85 million for removing copyright-management information.

"Claude's lyric outputs typically omit songwriter credits, publisher identification, and copyright notices," the complaint said. "The predictable result is that users receive copyrighted text without any indication of its origin — a circumstance that facilitates further downstream infringement and deprives the Elvis plaintiffs of the attribution and economic benefits to which [they are] entitled."

The plaintiffs allege the infringement extended through the full model-development process, beginning with Anthropic's acquisition and storage of the lyrics and continuing through data cleaning, tokenization, model training and Claude's responses to users. The complaint contends that each stage generated additional unauthorized copies of the works.

The plaintiffs' suit cites a split summary judgment ruling in a separate case brought against Anthropic, also in the Northern District of California. In that case, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled last year that using legally acquired books to train Claude was fair use but that Anthropic's acquisition and indefinite retention of pirated books in a general-purpose library was not. A class of authors in that case ultimately settled with Anthropic for $1.5 billion.

The Presley plaintiffs similarly allege Anthropic maintained a permanent repository of copyrighted material for possible use in future models and other commercial applications. They contend Anthropic could have trained Claude using public-domain material or obtained licenses for copyrighted works instead.

Instead, the complaint alleges Anthropic obtained lyrics to Presley's songs through web scraping and large online collections including Common Crawl, which is a vast archive of web pages, and The Pile, an open-source text dataset that included subtitles scraped from YouTube videos. The plaintiffs allege those sources contained copyrighted lyrics taken from licensed websites and videos.

The complaint asks the court to order Anthropic to destroy unauthorized copies of the songs allegedly contained in its training datasets, internal repositories, model weights and server infrastructure.

An attorney for the plaintiffs said in a statement to Law360 Monday that the rights holders brought the case to protect the Presley catalog.

"As we say in the lawsuit, the Elvis plaintiffs are guardians of, and highly protective of, Elvis's songs, which are some of the most iconic of all time," said Richard Busch of Adams & Reese LLP.

Counsel information for Anthropic was not immediately available.

The plaintiffs are represented by Richard S. Busch, Mark L. Block, David Niemierzycki and Andrew H. "Drew" Davis of Adams & Reese LLP, and Jeffrey E. Faucette and Martin R. Glick of Skaggs Faucette LLP.

The case is ABG EPE IP LLC et al. v. Anthropic, case number 5:26-cv-12473, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

--Editing by Alex Hubbard.

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