Elvis Presley rightsholders sue Anthropic for over $48.6M over lyrics used to train Claude

Rightsholders behind Elvis Presley’s hits have sued Anthropic, alleging the AI company scraped the lyrics to 274 songs and stripped songwriter credits while training Claude, Music Business Worldwide reported on Monday. The plaintiffs are seeking more than $48.6 million in damages.

According to the report, the claim rests on two allegations: that the lyrics were taken without authorization for model training, and that attribution to the songwriters was removed in the process. The damages figure exceeds $48.6 million and covers 274 songs.

Lyrics are among the more clearly licensed assets in the music business. Unlike sound recordings, they circulate as text that is copied, indexed and distributed across the web, making them easy to collect at scale; once attribution is stripped during data preparation, it is hard to trace back from a model or a training corpus.

The damages figure is small relative to Anthropic’s scale, but the principle is not: where training data comes from, and whether it is licensed and credited, is moving from an industry argument into individual court cases. For rightsholders, suing case by case is both a claim for compensation and an attempt to set terms for future licensing talks.

Public information remains limited. The report does not identify the court hearing the case or the full list of plaintiffs, and it does not mention a response from Anthropic. Whether the two sides enter settlement talks, and whether other owners of comparable catalogs follow with their own claims, cannot be confirmed yet.

What is clear is that the compliance cost of training data is becoming concrete. Whatever the outcome, the case will serve as a reference point in negotiations between music rightsholders and AI companies: a lyrics catalog is not free public text, and credit is not merely a matter of etiquette.

The next things to watch are Anthropic’s response and whether the court treats scraping the lyrics and training the model as two links in a single chain of infringement. That judgment could reach beyond Claude itself.