The companies and trusts that oversee Elvis Presley's music are suing Anthropic, alleging the AI company trained its chatbot Claude on the legendary musician's songs without permission. Authentic Brands Group filed the lawsuit on Friday, October 23, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint targets AI music generation, claiming Claude copies music Authentic Brands licenses and, in doing so, Anthropic is committing copyright infringement.
The lawsuit covers 274 songs, including "All Shook Up," "Can't Help Falling in Love" and "Don't Be Cruel." The plaintiffs allege Anthropic used automated scraping tools to scour the internet for content to train its AI models, did so throughout the entire development of the Claude models, and never paid royalties or requested licenses. They are seeking $150,000 per infringed track — roughly $41.1 million in total — with additional claims bringing the total sought to more than $48.6 million, according to Music Business Worldwide.
Anthropic rejected the claims. "We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully," a company spokesperson said. The case is one of the first major instances of an artist's estate bringing legal action against an AI company, though AI firms have previously faced lawsuits from record labels including Universal and Warner Bros. as well as the recording industry association RIAA.
Why it matters
Until now, the copyright fight over AI training data has mostly been waged by publishers and record labels. An artist's estate joining the fray changes the politics of the dispute: it is harder to frame the issue as a clash between tech companies and corporate rights-holders when the plaintiffs are the heirs of songwriters who depend on the catalog's revenue.
The case also tests the limits of the fair-use defense AI companies have leaned on. Anthropic has maintained that training on copyrighted material can be protected under U.S. fair-use law, but a court ruling that scraping an entire catalog of lyrics — and then generating near-copies of them — crosses the line would force every major AI lab to rethink how it builds training data. With the company's IPO now in motion, the timing raises the stakes further: investors will be watching whether the industry's most valuable legal question gets answered in a courtroom before it is settled in Congress.
Source: USA Today — Owners of Elvis' music sue Anthropic, claim copyright infringement (October 26, 2026). Summary rewritten by VCTRIA.
