The companies that own Elvis Presley’s music have taken the artificial intelligence fight to one of the biggest names in the field. A unit of Authentic Brands Group, the licensing company that controls much of the Presley catalog along with his name, image and likeness, filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic on Friday, October 23, accusing the company behind the Claude chatbot of using 274 Presley songs without permission to build its models.
Several other companies and entities that hold Elvis rights joined the complaint, which was first reported by Billboard. The works listed range from signature hits such as “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” “A Little Less Conversation,” “Return to Sender” and “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise” to deeper cuts from the catalog.
What the plaintiffs want
The suit asks for $150,000 for each song it says was infringed, the statutory maximum for willful infringement, which works out to roughly $41 million across the 274 titles. Beyond the training question, the complaint argues that Claude can still generate material that tracks the original compositions closely. According to the filing, when the chatbot was asked to rework specific songs “for a modern audience,” it produced versions that kept the structure and hooks of the originals, and the plaintiffs say this amounts to unlicensed derivative works despite the guardrails Anthropic added after earlier litigation.
The case is led by attorney Richard Busch, who described the Elvis plaintiffs as “deeply protective of these iconic songs.” Busch is a familiar figure in music litigation: he represented Eminem in his 2000s disputes over digital download royalties and later won the much-debated “Blurred Lines” verdict for Marvin Gaye’s estate against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams.
A representative for Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the outlets covering the filing.
Why it matters
Record companies and publishers have already gone after AI developers in court. Suno, the leading AI song generator, was sued by all three major music companies in 2024; it later settled with Warner Music Group but is still fighting Universal Music Group and Sony Music. Anthropic itself was sued by music publishers in 2023 over song lyrics, and earlier this week Reservoir Media filed its own claims against both Suno and Anthropic.
What sets this case apart is the name at its center. Rather than a label group or trade body, the plaintiffs are the rights holders of a single artist, and arguably the most famous recording artist in history. That gives the broader debate over whether AI training qualifies as fair use a highly recognizable test case, at a time when that defense remains unresolved across dozens of lawsuits with very large potential damages.
For catalog owners, the filing also signals a strategy: treating legacy repertoire not just as a licensing asset but as something to be actively defended as AI companies seek ever-larger pools of training material.
Source: Billboard, with additional reporting from Rolling Stone.
Photo: Elvis Presley on tour in 1972. Courtesy Everett Collection, via Billboard.