Elvis Presley's owners sue Anthropic over 274 songs, seeking up to $48.6 million

The rights holders behind Elvis Presley's catalogue have sued Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, saying it copied the lyrics of 274 of his recordings without a licence to train its artificial-intelligence models. The complaint, filed October 23 in the Northern District of California as ABG EPE IP LLC et al. v. Anthropic PBC, case number 5:26-cv-12473, asks for up to roughly $48.6 million. Anthropic said it disagrees with the claims and will defend the case. This is a civil complaint, a set of allegations that a court has not ruled on.

The number behind the number

Coverage of the suit has carried two different figures, $41.1 million and $48.6 million, and the gap is worth explaining because it is the whole shape of the case. The complaint brings three claims, each with its own statutory cap, applied across the same 274 songs listed in its Exhibit A:

Claim	Statute	Per work	x 274 songs
Copyright infringement	17 U.S.C. 504(c)	up to $150,000	$41,100,000
Removing copyright info (CMI)	DMCA 1202	up to $25,000	$6,850,000
Circumventing access controls	DMCA 1201	up to $2,500	$685,000
Total			$48,635,000

So the $41.1 million is the copyright claim on its own, the maximum willful-infringement award of $150,000 a work multiplied by 274. The $48.6 million is that plus the two Digital Millennium Copyright Act counts, which together add about $7.5 million. Both numbers come straight from the complaint's own prayer for relief. They are ceilings the plaintiffs are asking for, not an amount a court has awarded.

Who is suing

The lead plaintiff is ABG EPE IP LLC, an entity tied to Authentic Brands Group, which controls Presley's name and likeness and holds a share of the publishing in songs he recorded. The other plaintiffs are a group of music publishers and family trusts: Abilene Music LLC, Raleigh Music Publishing LLC, the Luigi Creatore Trust, the Susan T. Aberbach Revocable Trust, a trust under the Anne-Rachel Aberbach Family Trust, and an individual, Jason Simeon Aberbach. They are represented by Adams & Reese and Skaggs Faucette; the lead attorney, Richard Busch, has brought a series of high-profile music-copyright cases. The songs named in the complaint include "Can't Help Falling in Love," "All Shook Up," "Don't Be Cruel," "Return To Sender," "A Little Less Conversation" and "If I Can Dream."

What the complaint alleges

The plaintiffs say Anthropic made unauthorised copies of the lyrics, kept them in an internal library, used them to train its Claude models, and trained the models "to disregard" copyright-management information so the copying would be harder to detect. They also say Claude reproduces the material for users. The complaint alleges that even after Anthropic added guardrails, a recent version of Claude, when asked to recreate specific songs "for a modern audience," did so and, in the plaintiffs' telling, acknowledged the problem. The filing quotes the model describing its own output as "edging past 'inspired by' into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out." That quotation is the plaintiffs' characterisation of a model response; Anthropic has not conceded it.

The complaint leans on an earlier case in the same court, Bartz v. Anthropic, the class action by authors that Anthropic settled. Anthropic's recent IPO prospectus recorded a $1.5 billion charge it labelled the "Bartz settlement." The Elvis plaintiffs argue that copyright law "contains no technology-sector exception" and that training on unlicensed lyrics is infringement whatever it is used for.

Why it matters now

The timing is the business story. Anthropic made its IPO paperwork public on October 26, three days after this suit was filed, in a Form S-1 that reported $16.3 billion of revenue in the first half of 2026 and a net loss dominated by non-cash accounting. Against a company that secondary markets have valued well above a trillion dollars, $48.6 million is not a material number on its own. What matters more is the pattern: the Presley case is one of a line of music-industry suits over AI training, and the complaint's own caption references other pending Anthropic music cases in the same district. A string of these claims, plus the $1.5 billion the company has already paid to settle the authors' case, is the reason training data is now a named risk in the prospectus.

For business readers, the practical point is narrow and real: the legal status of training a commercial model on copyrighted material is still being fought out case by case, and the outcomes will set the price of the data that AI products are built from. That cost lands on every company shipping a generative product, not only on Anthropic.

What to watch

• Anthropic's response: its answer or a motion to dismiss, and whether it argues fair use as it did in the authors' litigation.
• Consolidation: whether this case is grouped with the other music-publisher suits against Anthropic in the Northern District of California.
• The output claim: how the court treats the allegation that Claude itself reproduces lyrics, which is a different question from how the model was trained.
• The IPO: whether the litigation surfaces in a later S-1 amendment as the offering moves toward a price range.

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Disclosure: this article was drafted by an AI system built by Anthropic, the company it covers. Every figure comes from the court filing cited. Sources: the complaint in ABG EPE IP LLC et al. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-12473 (N.D. Cal., filed Oct. 23, 2026); Anthropic Form S-1 on SEC EDGAR; Anthropic's on-record statement that it will defend. The allegations are unproven. This is market information, not investment advice.