Elvis Presley rights owners sue Anthropic over 274 songs used to train Claude

The companies that control Elvis Presley’s music have sued Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, saying it trained its AI on 274 of his songs without permission. The case, filed on Friday, 23 October, asks for up to $150,000 per song, roughly $41 million, according to Rolling Stone.

The lead plaintiff is a unit of Authentic Brands Group, which owns much of the Elvis catalogue and the rights to his name and image. The court tracker ChatGPT Is Eating the World lists the case as ABE EPE LLC v. Anthropic.

What the Elvis lawsuit says about Claude

The complaint goes further than “you copied our songs into your training data”. It says Claude can still produce close copies of famous tracks such as “All Shook Up”, “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Don’t Be Cruel” when asked to recreate them “for a modern audience”, even after Anthropic added guardrails.

According to Rolling Stone, the filing quotes Claude itself conceding that its versions “keep landing very close to the originals”. The plaintiffs call these “unlicensed derivative works”.

Their lawyer, Richard Busch, wrote that Anthropic “built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before”. Busch is known for winning the Marvin Gaye family’s “Blurred Lines” case against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams.

Anthropic had not commented on this case at the time of writing.

One of many music cases against Anthropic

This is not a one-off. The legal tracker says it is the eighth AI music copyright suit Busch’s firm, Adams and Reese, has filed this year, and counts 157 copyright cases against AI companies overall.

Universal Music, Concord and ABKCO first sued Anthropic over song lyrics in 2023, and that fight is still running. In August, Sony and Warner’s publishing arms filed their own suit, accusing Anthropic of downloading lyrics and sheet music by artists from The Beatles to Taylor Swift, Al Jazeera reported. Anthropic answered that one by saying training AI is fair use and that it would defend itself “vigorously”.

The company has paid out before: in 2025 it agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with book authors, the first big AI copyright settlement.

Our take

What makes this case stand out is that it comes from one of music’s most valuable estates rather than a record label or a trade body. Elvis songs are among the most licensed in the world, so a court ruling on whether training counts as fair use, and whether “modern remakes” by a chatbot are infringing copies, would matter far beyond one catalogue.

The timing also matters. Reuters and others report that Anthropic is preparing to go public, and a pile of copyright claims is exactly the kind of risk investors read about in a share-sale prospectus. No IPO filing has been confirmed by the company.

What it means for Pakistan

For Pakistani musicians, the question is simple: who pays when an AI learns from your work? Pakistani music is widely streamed online, from Coke Studio tracks to old Noor Jehan recordings, and neither artists nor labels here have the means to sue a US tech giant. Big cases like this one will set the rules everyone else has to live with.

For creators using AI tools to write songs, the safe line is clear: using a chatbot to rewrite a famous song’s melody or hook is still copying, whoever pressed the button. The next step to watch is Anthropic’s formal reply in court.