Elvis Music Copyright Holders Sue Anthropic: Claim Unauthorized Training of Claude on 274 Songs, Seek $50 Million

According to a report by ZDNet Korea, Authentic Brands Group, which manages Elvis Presley's intellectual property, along with related music copyright entities, filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Anthropic on October 23, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco. The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic used 274 Elvis Presley songs as training data without authorization while developing its AI chatbot Claude, and failed to pay any licensing fees.

The disputed songs include hits such as "Can't Help Falling in Love" and "All Shook Up." The plaintiffs pointed out that Anthropic built an internal data repository to store materials like song lyrics over a long period and repeatedly copied and used this data when training new Claude models. Furthermore, the complaint notes that when users asked Claude to modify existing songs, the model generated lyrics that retained the original structure and chorus while changing only some expressions. The plaintiffs argue that generating such derivative works without the original authors' permission also constitutes copyright infringement.

The plaintiffs also accused Anthropic of failing to take sufficient measures to stop the infringement after receiving notice of the unauthorized use, continuing to utilize the works instead. The lawsuit seeks approximately $50 million (about 66.1 billion Korean won) in damages plus legal costs.

This is not Anthropic's first challenge of this kind. Previously, the company faced a class-action lawsuit from American authors for mass-downloading books from illegal e-book sharing sites for training purposes. In July 2026, a U.S. court approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and the authors, which covered English translations of works by several authors, including Nobel laureate Han Kang.