IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: On the eve of its IPO announcement, The King enters the ring against Anthropic, (Oct 26, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

Owners of the lyrics to 274 Elvis songs accuse the AI company of copyright infringement and DMCA violations.

Anthropic unlawfully reproduced the lyrics of nearly 300 Elvis Presley songs when it ingested them to train its popular AI model Claude, a new federal lawsuit contends. The estimated $41 million lawsuit, filed on the eve of the AI company’s formal announcement of its long-awaited initial public offering, also alleges that Claude continues to infringe their rights to those songs when it reproduces them in response to user prompts (ABG EPE IP LLC v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-12473 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 23, 2026)).

The lawsuit was brought by entities that collectively own rights to 274 songs in the legendary crooner’s catalog. The songs, listed in full in an exhibit to the complaint, include classics such as "All Shook Up," "Can’t Help Falling in Love," "Don’t Be Cruel," and "A Little Less Conversation." While extensive, the list of songs included in the complaint excludes a number of standards by Presley, known as the King of Rock and Roll, such as "Jailhouse Rock," "Hound Dog," and "Blue Suede Shoes."

The lawsuit levels a now-familiar set of allegations against the leading AI company. It alleges that Anthropic ingested the lyrics to the songs at issue when it mass-ingested text from lyrics-aggregation sites, streaming-platform metadata, and large-scale web-crawl archives such as Common Crawl, The Pile, and others. The lawsuit also alleges that Claude’s training on those lyrics “has resulted in the model’s capacity to reproduce those lyrics—in full or in substantial part—when prompted by end users.” Claude has reproduced those lyrics, the lawsuit asserts, when users have requested specific song lyrics by title, asked for songs “in the style of” Elvis standards, or requested ostensibly “original” compositions that “draw upon the patterns Claude internalized during training.”

As with many other actions pending against Anthropic, the lawsuit also brings claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. The AI company violated the DMCA, the complaint alleges, when it downloaded Elvis lyrics from licensed streaming and lyrics platforms after bypassing technological measures designed to control access to those songs. The company further violated the Act, the lawsuit contends, by removing copyright management information while ingesting Elvis lyrics into its training database—thus ostensibly making it easier, the complaint asserts, to conceal later infringing reproductions of those lyrics.

The lawsuit demands actual damages and disgorgement of profits or, in the alternative, an award of statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each of the 274 songs named in the complaint—which would add up to $41.1 million if granted in full.

The Case is No. 5:26-cv-12473.

Attorneys: Richard Steven Busch (Adams & Reese, Nashville LLP) for ABG EPE IP LLC.

Companies: ABG EPE IP LLC; Anthropic PBC

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