Elvis Presley's rights owners sue Anthropic over 274 songs, seeking $41.1 million

The people who own Elvis Presley’s music have sued Anthropic over 274 of his songs. The complaint was filed on Friday, October 23, 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, and Billboard broke the story a day later.

The lead plaintiff is ABG EPE IP LLC, a unit of Authentic Brands Group, the licensing company that controls much of Presley’s catalog, his trademarks and his name, image and likeness. Other companies holding Elvis rights joined it. They claim Anthropic trained Claude on the songs without a license, and that Claude can still turn out versions of them.

The songs run from “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up” to “A Little Less Conversation”, “Return to Sender” and “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise”, plus a long tail of deeper cuts.

Anthropic didn’t answer Billboard or The Hollywood Reporter before they published. In its other music cases it argues that training on copyrighted works is fair use.

What the Elvis Presley complaint says Claude does with his songs

The complaint makes 2 claims, and they’re worth keeping apart.

The first is about training. Anthropic copied the 274 songs into its training data without asking or paying, so the songs sit inside the model.

The second is about output, and it’s the sharper one. Anthropic added lyric “guardrails” after the publishers sued it in 2023. The complaint says that when Claude was asked to recreate specific songs “for a modern audience”, it did it anyway, and then described its own work like this, as quoted by Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter:

“These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges.”

If that sentence sounds familiar, it should. It’s word for word the Claude reply in paragraph 4 of Reservoir’s complaint, which I covered when Reservoir sued Suno and Anthropic on October 21. Same lawyer, same paragraph, new catalog.

One caveat: the Elvis complaint itself isn’t public yet. The CourtListener docket lists the case, but no document has been uploaded, so everything above comes from the press reports, not from the filing.

So who is the lawyer reusing that paragraph?

Richard Busch’s third AI lawsuit against Anthropic since August

Richard Busch represented Eminem in his digital download cases and Marvin Gaye’s family in the Blurred Lines case. This year he became the lawyer catalog owners call when they want to sue an AI company.

That makes Elvis his fourth AI music suit in 10 weeks, and his third against Anthropic. Billboard quotes his opening line from the complaint:

“

The Elvis Plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before.

Busch’s clients aren’t the only ones in that court. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic on August 28, BMG filed in March, and Concord, Universal and ABKCO have been suing since 2023. Judge Eumi Lee heard both sides on fair use in the publishers’ oldest case on October 21, the same day Reservoir filed, and she hasn’t ruled.

Why the Elvis Presley lawsuit lands differently from the publisher cases

Every other music suit against Anthropic was brought by a publisher with a catalog of thousands of writers. This one is about one man’s songs. Billboard calls it “by far the most high-profile” AI case filed on behalf of an individual musician.

The money is smaller than Reservoir’s $151.4 million, but the math works the same way. US copyright law allows up to $150,000 per work when the infringement is willful, and only for works registered with the US Copyright Office. That’s why every one of these complaints arrives with a numbered song list: the list is the bill.

So if you own registered songs, the price tag on your catalog in these cases is the number of titles on your list, multiplied by $150,000 at the ceiling. A court sets the real number, and nothing has been decided yet.

I’m tracking the case on a new Elvis Presley v. Anthropic lawsuit tracker, next to Reservoir’s. The next thing to watch is whether Anthropic answers or asks to tie the case to the ones already in front of Judge Lee.