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Elvis Presley's music rights owners sue Anthropic over song lyrics

The complaint covers 274 compositions and seeks the statutory maximum of $41.1 million, plus impoundment of copies held in training datasets and model weights.

  • Courts & copyright
  • Minor

ABG EPE IP LLC and a group of trusts and music-publishing companies that own or control rights in songs recorded by Elvis Presley sued Anthropic in the Northern District of California on 23 October. They allege that Anthropic copied the lyrics to 274 compositions, including “All Shook Up”, “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Don’t Be Cruel”, to train Claude, and that Claude reproduces them in its output.

The complaint pleads direct copyright infringement, circumvention of protection measures under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and removal or alteration of copyright management information. On training, it alleges that Anthropic copied lyrics through datasets including Common Crawl, which it says holds lyrics scraped from licensed lyric sites, and The Pile, including a YouTube-subtitles subset, and that it torrented pirated libraries; the last point draws on evidence from the earlier Bartz case, which ended in a settlement with book authors. On output, it quotes a Claude response, which it says came when Claude was asked to recreate songs “for a modern audience”, in which the model said its renders were “edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song”.

The plaintiffs seek the statutory maximum of $150,000 for each of the 274 works, which the complaint totals at $41.1 million, a permanent injunction, and an order to hand over for impoundment or destruction any copies kept in training datasets, internal repositories and model weights. These are allegations; the sources reviewed contain no response from Anthropic.

The complaint places itself within Anthropic’s existing music litigation, citing Concord Music Group’s 2023 suit and a second Concord action filed in January 2026 in the same district, and noting at least six music-composition suits pending there. It arrived about two months after Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed their own suit, so Anthropic faces lyrics claims from several separate groups of rights holders.

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