The company that owns the rights to Elvis Presley's music has sued Anthropic, accusing the AI firm of training its Claude chatbot on 274 of the singer's songs without ever paying for a license — the latest in a string of music-copyright suits piling up against the company just as it files for what could be the largest stock listing in history.
Authentic Brands Group, which controls the Elvis catalog, filed the complaint alleging that Anthropic "has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before." The suit names hits including "All Shook Up," "Can't Help Falling in Love," "A Little Less Conversation," "Don't Be Cruel" and "Return to Sender," and seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed song — as much as $41 million in total.
"Edging past 'inspired by'"
The complaint argues the songs were used to create "unlicensed derivative works," and cites an exchange in which Claude, asked to recreate specific songs "for a modern audience," allegedly admitted its output remained too close to the originals even after Anthropic added content safeguards. "These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges," Claude is quoted as responding, according to the filing. The complaint argues that amounts to "edging past 'inspired by' into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out."
A spokesperson for Anthropic said the company "disagree[s] with the claims and intend[s] to defend this case fully." The Elvis suit follows a copyright claim brought last week by music company Reservoir over Anthropic's alleged use of song lyrics, and an ongoing case filed in January by Universal Music Group. Last year, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a separate class-action suit brought by authors over its use of their books to train its models — at the time, the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history.
The music industry has increasingly treated AI training data as a legal battleground, with multiple labels and rights holders arguing that chatbots capable of reproducing a song's melody and structure, even with altered lyrics, cross a line that paraphrasing text does not. Authentic Brands' complaint frames the Elvis catalog in sweeping terms, calling it one of "the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history" and arguing the company has been "deeply protective" of it for decades.