The suit says Anthropic trained Claude on the lyrics without a license and removed songwriter credits, and that Claude still reproduces and rewrites songs despite its lyric filters.
Companies and family trusts that control the rights to 274 songs recorded by Elvis Presley sued Anthropic on Oct. 23, alleging it copied the songs’ lyrics without a license to train its Claude AI models and removed songwriter and publisher credits from them.
The suit also says Claude still reproduces and rewrites songs, despite lyric filters Anthropic agreed to keep in place to settle part of an earlier lawsuit by other music publishers. The plaintiffs seek up to $48.6 million.
The suit says Claude’s lyric filters fail when a user rephrases a request, and Claude’s answers usually omit songwriter credits. As a result, it says, users can receive copyrighted lyrics with no indication of their source.
The suit says Anthropic trained Claude on lyrics it never licensed
According to the complaint, Anthropic trained Claude on text it copied from websites and on large third-party text collections, both of which included the lyrics. One of them, The Pile, includes YouTube subtitles that the complaint says contain five of the songs, including “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Anthropic admitted in a previous copyright case, Bartz v. Anthropic, that at least one released Claude model was trained on that subtitle data.
The complaint also says the lyrics appear in hundreds of books that Anthropic pirated and used without permission. In the Bartz case, Anthropic was sued over those pirated books and settled for $1.5 billion.
The suit says Anthropic chose the tool that removed the most credits
Licensed lyric websites must show each song’s title, songwriter, and publisher. The law calls this copyright management information, and makes it illegal to remove it knowing that doing so will help hide infringement.
The complaint says Anthropic compared three programs for cleaning the text it collected and chose the one that removed the most author and publisher information. As a result, it says, Claude’s lyric answers usually leave out those credits, which makes it harder for rights owners to recognize their lyrics.
The suit says Claude still reproduces and rewrites songs despite its filters
Universal Music Publishing, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic over Claude’s lyric answers in October 2023. Anthropic then added filters meant to stop Claude from reproducing lyrics. In December 2024, it agreed to keep them in place, according to Bloomberg Law.
The Elvis complaint says the filters cover only a small group of well-known songs and fail when a user rewords the request. According to the complaint, Claude Sonnet 5 wrote several versions of songs “for a modern audience,” then said its own versions copied the originals: “These renders keep landing very close to the originals… That’s edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out.”
The complaint doesn’t say which songs Claude rewrote, and its other examples come from other publishers’ lawsuits against Anthropic. It alleges that Claude copied all 274 Presley songs “on information and belief,” meaning the plaintiffs believe it but have not yet seen the evidence.
The plaintiffs seek maximum damages
Copyright law lets an owner seek a fixed amount for each copied song, instead of proving how much money it lost. The amount can reach $150,000 per song if the company knew it was copying without permission. The complaint argues Anthropic knew. It says Anthropic employees asked Claude for copyrighted lyrics while testing it before release, confirming Claude could supply them. It also says that in December 2023 Anthropic promised to cover customers sued for copyright infringement over Claude’s answers, which the plaintiffs say shows Anthropic expected those answers could infringe.
The plaintiffs ask for the maximum on each of their three claims, for each of the 274 songs:
- Copyright infringement: $150,000 per song, for $41.1 million.
- Getting around logins, paywalls, and bot-blocking on licensed sites: $2,500 per song, for $685,000.
- Removing credits: $25,000 per song, for $6.85 million.
They also ask the court to order Anthropic to destroy every copy of the songs, including copies in Claude’s “model weights,” the files that store what a trained model learned.
Anthropic may argue “fair use,” as it has in other cases
Anthropic may argue that its use of the Presley lyrics is “fair use,” a legal rule that allows some use of copyrighted work without permission. It made that argument in earlier copyright lawsuits, including the Bartz case.
It is also making that argument in the 2023 lawsuit brought by Universal Music Publishing, Concord, and ABKCO, which is still active. Judge Eumi Lee heard arguments on Oct. 21 and has not ruled.
The Elvis complaint says that rule does not apply here.
