Elvis Presley's rightsholders sue Anthropic over 274 songs, seeking about $41 million

The people who control Elvis Presley's music have taken the AI company Anthropic to court. A copyright lawsuit filed on Friday, 23 October 2026 covers 274 Presley songs and is captioned ABE EPE LLC v. Anthropic. ABE EPE is the Presley rights entity run by Authentic Brands Group, the licensing company that manages his music and likeness.

The complaint is an allegation, not a finding, and no court has ruled on any of it.

What the plaintiffs say

The rightsholders allege that Anthropic trained its Claude models on Presley's recordings and compositions without permission or payment. They also allege that Claude can produce close imitations of the songs, and that this continued even after guardrails were added. In the plaintiffs' framing, that makes the output unlicensed derivative work.

The songs named include "Can't Help Falling in Love", "All Shook Up", "Don't Be Cruel", "A Little Less Conversation", "Return to Sender" and "(You're the) Devil in Disguise", alongside lesser-known album tracks.

The money

The suit seeks statutory damages. At the maximum of $150,000 per work, 274 songs comes to roughly $41 million, which is the figure most often quoted for the case. The complaint reportedly also brings claims over removing copyright management information and circumventing technical protections. The legal team is led by Richard Busch, whose past work includes the Marvin Gaye estate's "Blurred Lines" case.

Anthropic had not publicly responded when this was written. We will update the story if it does.

Why it matters

Music publishers and labels have been moving against AI companies for some time. Only days ago, Reservoir Media sued the AI music generator Suno over 1,050 songs, seeking more than $186 million; we covered that case here. What is different here is the plaintiff: the estate-side owners of one of the most recognisable catalogs in popular music, going after a company that builds general-purpose language models rather than a dedicated music tool.

For working songwriters, the question underneath is the same in every one of these cases: whether training on a song needs a licence, and what an AI system may produce in a song's style. The courts have not settled that, and this case will add another test of it.

Presley's catalog is also still very much in circulation. Browse his artist page for everything we have published on him.