On October 23, the companies and families behind 274 Elvis Presley songs sued AI company Anthropic in federal court in California. The case is ABG EPE IP LLC, et al. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-12473 (N.D. Cal.). It was filed by Nashville counsel, Richard Busch and Mark Block of Adams & Reese.
What they claim
The complaint pleads three counts: copyright infringement, circumvention of access controls (17 U.S.C. § 1201), and removal of copyright management information, meaning titles and songwriter credits (§ 1202). The statutory-damages demand is about $41.1 million on the infringement count alone, and about $48.6 million across all three by my arithmetic. The plaintiffs also want an injunction and an accounting of Anthropic’s training data.
The allegations are that Anthropic trained its Claude models on scraped and pirated text containing the lyrics, stripped out the credits in the process, and that Claude can still produce lyrics or derivative versions of them despite output filters. Anthropic will contest all of it, and much of the complaint is pleaded on information and belief. The public copy of the complaint does not include Exhibit A, the list of the 274 works. The complaint also lists three related music cases against Anthropic pending in the same court: two Concord actions and one brought by BMG.
The part that surprised me
Tennessee has two laws with Elvis’s fingerprints on them: the 1984 Personal Rights Protection Act, and the ELVIS Act of 2024, which was written to stop AI voice and likeness cloning. Neither is in the complaint. The plaintiffs sued on copyright alone, even though the Elvis name has long been one of the most vigorously policed in the business. Authentic Brands, which controls Elvis Presley Enterprises, sent cease-and-desist letters to Las Vegas wedding chapels in 2022 over Elvis-themed ceremonies.
My read is that these plaintiffs hold compositions, Claude is a text model, and the ELVIS Act’s strongest provisions concern voice and likeness. But the complaint alleges users ask Claude for songs “in the style of” artists in this catalog, and a future dispute over audio output could put the persona-rights tools back on the table. For our NIL practice, the lesson is that copyright and persona rights are separate toolboxes, and a catalog or estate may need both.
What to do now
- Register your works, and register on time. Statutory damages depend on it.
- Read your lyric licenses. The credit-stripping theory leans on licenses that require lyric sites to show titles and writers. If yours don’t, you’re missing a hook.
- Update your name, image, likeness and voice paperwork. Make sure grants reach voice and AI replicas, and that someone with standing holds the rights after death.
- Watch the docket. Anthropic’s response, and whether this case is related to the Concord cases before Judge Lee, will tell us a lot.
Read and listen
The full analysis, including Anthropic’s best defenses and my take, is on Substack: read the note where you’ll so find a copy of the COMPLAINT (see direct link below). The Gavel Drop episode is here: watch it on YouTube or just click below. You can read the full complaint here: ABG EPE IP LLC, et al. v. Anthropic PBC, Complaint (PDF).
Related Videos
Gavel Drop episode on the Music Row Dealmakers YouTube channel
This post is general information, not legal advice. Shrum & Associates, PC represents clients across the Music Row community in entertainment, trademark, contract and NIL matters, with over 80 years of collective experience.
Disclosure: Anthropic is the defendant in this case. This post was prepared with help from Claude, Anthropic’s AI model.