A licensing group, not the estate, is the plaintiff
Authentic Brands Group, the licensing group that controls Elvis Presley’s music and likeness, filed suit against Anthropic on Friday, as Billboard first reported. The case is captioned ABE EPE LLC v. Anthropic. It alleges that the company behind Claude infringed the rights to 274 Presley songs, from “All Shook Up” and “Don’t Be Cruel” to far less familiar tracks, and it seeks $150,000 for each infringed work — roughly $41 million in total.
Record labels including Universal and Warner, and the RIAA, have sued AI companies before. This is one of the first times the rightsholders behind a single artist’s catalogue have brought an action of this kind.
The complaint quotes Claude on its own output
The filing’s central allegation is not only that Anthropic trained on the recordings, but that Claude still reproduces them. It says Claude has produced infringing output drawn from effectively every catalogue available on the internet, and that the guardrails Anthropic put up after earlier suits did not stop it.
To support that, the complaint quotes an exchange in which Claude was asked to recreate specific songs “for a modern audience”. According to the filing, Claude did so and then said the results kept landing very close to the originals — the same structure, the same hooks with light rewording, and full sets of verses, choruses and bridges — and that this was “edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song”, even with the words swapped out.
That is an unusual piece of evidence: a model’s own description of what it had just written, offered by the plaintiffs as proof of infringement.
The lawyer and the theory
Richard Busch is the lead attorney. He previously acted for the Marvin Gaye estate in the “Blurred Lines” case against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. The Elvis complaint runs on a related theory — that Anthropic is using the songs to create unlicensed derivative works.
Busch wrote that the plaintiffs are enforcing their exclusive rights against a defendant that has built its entire business model on copyright infringement “at a scale never seen before”.
What it sits alongside
Anthropic agreed in 2025 to a $1.5 billion settlement in a separate copyright case brought by authors, and legal action by the music industry against AI developers has continued through this year. Every allegation here is the plaintiffs’ claim: no court has ruled, and Anthropic had not commented when the first reports ran.
What to watch is whether Anthropic answers the specific claim about output produced after the guardrails went up. That is the part of this complaint that does not depend on what was in the training set.
