Elvis rights holders sue Anthropic over 274 songs

The owners of the rights to 274 Elvis Presley songs have sued Anthropic, the company behind Claude, accusing it of copying their work without a license to train the chatbot. The lawsuitPDF was filed Friday in federal court in the Northern District of California, case 5:26-cv-12473, and asks for a jury trial.

The plaintiffs include ABG EPE IP LLC, three trusts, Jason Aberbach and the music publishers Abilene Music and Raleigh Music Publishing. Among the songs on the list are "Don't Be Cruel," "A Little Less Conversation" and "Can't Help Falling in Love."

They allege Anthropic copied the lyrics from the internet and from pirate libraries of books, kept them in a permanent central library to train later models, and stripped out the authorship and publisher information that came with them. They also say the filters the company added after earlier suits by music publishers cover only a handful of famous songs and can be bypassed by rewording a request.

The complaint's centerpiece is a response from Claude Sonnet 5, the latest version. Asked to rewrite songs "for a modern audience," the filing says, the model answered:

These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges. That's edging past "inspired by" into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out.

The songs in that example, and the other responses the complaint details, come from other catalogs. For Elvis's songs, it says, on information and belief, that Claude produced copies of all 274.

The plaintiffs seek the legal maximum on each of three claims. Added together, the figures come to $48.6 million:

They also want a permanent order barring Anthropic from further infringement and the destruction of copies held in its training sets, repositories and model weights. All of it is allegation, not proven fact.

It is one of at least six suits over musical compositions that, by the plaintiffs' own count, remain open in the same district.