Elvis Presley in a 1957 publicity photo for the film Jailhouse Rock. File photo. Image: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Library of Congress) / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain, cropped
The songs Elvis Presley made famous are now part of the AI copyright war. The companies and family trusts that own 274 of them, including ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ and ‘A Little Less Conversation’, sued Anthropic on Friday, October 23, saying it copied their lyrics to train Claude and that Claude still turns out near-copies of the songs today.
The case was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by Richard Busch of the law firm Adams & Reese, the lawyer who won the ‘Blurred Lines’ case for Marvin Gaye’s family. Two days earlier he filed Reservoir Media’s suits against Suno and Anthropic over Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire’ and Madonna’s ‘Papa Don’t Preach’, and the new complaint follows the same script, often word for word.
Who is suing
The lead plaintiff is ABG EPE IP, part of Authentic Brands Group, the licensing company that controls Presley’s name, image and much of his catalogue. It is joined by Raleigh Music Publishing, Abilene Music, members and trusts of the Aberbach family, whose Hill and Range company published many of Presley’s 1950s hits, and the trust of Luigi Creatore, who co-wrote ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’. The songs listed also include ‘All Shook Up’, ‘Return to Sender’, ‘If I Can Dream’ and ‘(You’re the) Devil in Disguise’.
They ask for the maximum $150,000 per song for wilful infringement, which comes to $41.1 million, plus $685,000 for getting round access controls and $6.85 million for stripping song titles and writer credits from the lyrics: about $48.6 million in all. They also want every unlicensed copy destroyed, including any held in “training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure”, and a full accounting of Anthropic’s training data.
What the complaint says Claude did
The suit says the lyrics reached Claude through web scrapes such as Common Crawl, which it says copied them from licensed lyrics sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind, and through The Pile, whose YouTube Subtitles section, it says, includes ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ and ‘Don’t Be Cruel’. It quotes Anthropic’s own admission in the authors’ case Bartz v. Anthropic that a released Claude model was trained on YouTube subtitle data from a version of The Pile, and leans on that case’s findings that Anthropic downloaded pirated books from Library Genesis. Anthropic agreed in 2025 to pay $1.5 billion to settle that case, after a judge ruled that training on bought books was fair use but keeping pirated copies was not.
It also targets Claude’s output. Anthropic added filters to stop Claude reciting lyrics after music publishers led by Concord sued in 2023, but the complaint says Claude Haiku 4.5 and Claude Sonnet 5, while refusing to print lyrics, will still rewrite songs “for a modern audience”. It quotes Claude saying of its own rewrites that they “keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording”. The suit says, without giving examples for each, that Claude has produced infringing output for all 274 songs.
‘Deeply protective of these iconic songs’
The complaint opens with the same charge Busch made for Reservoir:
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.
Richard Busch, lawyer for the Elvis Plaintiffs, in the complaint
It counts at least six suits over song lyrics now pending against Anthropic in the same court, and argues that fair use cannot apply when the copies came from pirate sites and were kept for good. Anthropic has argued in other cases that training on copyrighted work is fair use, a question courts are still settling, as an appeals court ruling against an AI company in September showed. It is also fighting suits from outside music, such as Canada’s biggest newspapers. Anthropic hasn’t commented on the Elvis suit.
Why it matters
Presley is the most famous name yet to join the music industry’s legal fight with Anthropic, and the near-identical wording of the Reservoir and Elvis suits suggests Busch has a template that other catalogue owners can sign up to. Each new case adds damages and discovery for Anthropic to deal with as it heads for a public listing.
Sources: ABG EPE IP LLC et al. v. Anthropic PBC complaint (N.D. Cal., case 5:26-cv-12473).
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