Rights holders for Elvis Presley have sued Anthropic in the US, alleging that the company used lyrics from 274 songs without permission to train Claude and generate unauthorised adaptations.
The lawsuit, filed on 23 October in the Northern District of California, places an individual artist's catalogue at the centre of a legal dispute that has so far been dominated by record labels, music publishers and technology companies.
Why the Elvis Lawsuit Matters for Anthropic
ABG EPE IP LLC, an entity associated with licensing company Authentic Brands Group, brought the action alongside trusts, music publishers and individual rights holders with interests in compositions recorded by Presley.
The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic used songs including 'Can't Help Falling in Love', 'All Shook Up', 'Don't Be Cruel' and 'Return to Sender' without a licence or payment.
They are seeking up to $41.1m (£31m) in statutory damages for alleged wilful copyright infringement, calculated at a maximum of $150,000 (£113,000) for each of the 274 works.
The complaint also seeks $685,000 (£517,000) under a claim concerning the alleged circumvention of technological protection measures and $6.85m (£5.2m) over alleged removal or alteration of copyright management information.
Together, those specified statutory demands amount to about $48.635m (£36.7m), excluding costs, legal fees and other relief. These are amounts requested by the plaintiffs, not damages awarded by a court.
The complaint also alleges that Claude continued to produce outputs closely resembling specific songs after Anthropic introduced copyright guardrails. The plaintiffs cite a Claude response describing generated material as landing 'very close to the originals', with similar structures, hooks and sections.
That response is evidence presented by the plaintiffs, rather than an independent technical or legal finding that the material infringed copyright.
The case changes the shape of the dispute.
Music companies have already brought multiple copyright actions against Anthropic, including the earlier case involving publishers representing thousands of songs, but the Presley lawsuit is one of the first prominent cases centred on a single artist's catalogue.
The underlying legal theory is familiar; the plaintiff is not.
Fair Use Remains the Central Legal Question
The Presley filing arrived days after a hearing in a separate case brought by Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO Music.
US District Judge Eumi Lee did not rule on 21 October after hearing arguments about whether Anthropic's use of millions of song lyrics to train Claude qualifies as fair use under US copyright law.
Anthropic argued that training produces transformative content, while the publishers said Claude can generate competing material that harms songwriters and the market for lyrics.
Two federal judges in Northern California previously found that certain uses of copyrighted books to train AI models qualified as fair use, although their reasoning differed.
In Anthropic's earlier authors' case, Judge William Alsup distinguished AI training from the company's alleged retention of pirated books in a permanent general-purpose library. Judge Vince Chhabria's ruling in favour of Meta emphasised deficiencies in evidence of market harm.
Neither ruling established a blanket exemption for AI training.
The legal issue is also narrower than the wider debate about AI-generated music. The Presley complaint concerns copyrighted lyrics and musical compositions used by a text-based AI model, rather than an audio-generation system such as Suno.
That distinction has prompted online discussion about whether Claude can be treated like a music-generation platform and how rights holders could prove that specific works were included in a model's training process.
A Wider Copyright Battle
The Presley action is part of a broader series of music-publishing lawsuits against Anthropic. Earlier cases have involved Universal Music, Concord, ABKCO, BMG Rights Management, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music.
At least six cases involving musical compositions and AI training were pending in the Northern District of California when the Presley complaint was filed, according to lawyers representing the plaintiffs.
In a separate case, Round Hill Music alleged that Anthropic used lyrics from at least 500 songs to train Claude and said the number of compositions involved could eventually rise into the tens of thousands.
Anthropic said: 'We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully.'
The dispute follows a wider pattern of copyright questions around Claude, including experiments involving the model's refusal to reproduce lyrics. A previous TechTimes report on Claude's copyright behaviour also noted that model behaviour does not, by itself, establish how training material was obtained.
What the UK Is Watching
The dispute arrives as the UK continues to consider how copyright law should apply to artificial intelligence.
A March 2026 UK government report said ministers would not introduce reforms until they had more evidence and confidence that any changes would protect right holders while allowing AI developers to access high-quality content.
It also said a broad copyright exception with an opt-out mechanism was no longer the government's preferred option.
The UK's existing text-and-data-mining exception applies to non-commercial research, while the US relies on the contested fair-use doctrine.
Although US court decisions would not determine the application of UK copyright law, they could inform the wider debate over AI training, licensing and the protection of copyrighted material.
