The owners of Elvis Presley's intellectual property rights have sued Anthropic, claiming it trained its Claude models on 274 of his songs without permission.
The complaint, according to reports, names hits including "Can't Help Falling in Love," "Don't Be Cruel," "Return to Sender," and "(You're the) Devil in Disguise." It accuses Anthropic of having "built its entire business model on infringing copyrights at an unfathomable scale." The plaintiffs want a permanent injunction barring Anthropic from using the songs, plus damages of up to $150,000 per work. Across 274 works, that tops out at $41.1 million. Anthropic said it disagrees with the claims and "intend[s] to defend this case fully."
The more interesting part is what the filing says about outputs. It describes users asking Claude to recreate and update Presley songs, and says the results land "very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges." In the plaintiffs' words, that is "edging past 'inspired by' into reproducing the copyrighted song."
That framing differs from the $1.5 billion class action in which authors accused Anthropic of downloading pirated books, which settled in July. That case was largely about how the training material was obtained. This one adds a claim about what the model produces on request, which is harder to wave away as a one-time acquisition problem.
It also joins a crowded docket. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued in August, alleging a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale." Universal Music Group has sued twice, in October 2023 and again in January.
On money alone, the Presley case is modest. The maximum is under 3% of the book settlement. The injunction is the sharper threat, because a court order to stop using specific songs would force a question the industry has mostly avoided: whether a trained model can be made to unlearn a catalog, or whether the only real remedy is retraining.