In a high-stakes copyright lawsuit filed Friday, Authentic Brands Group, the entity holding full intellectual property rights to Elvis Presley’s legendary music catalog, has taken legal action against prominent artificial intelligence developer Anthropic, alleging the tech firm exploited 274 of the rock and roll icon’s most celebrated compositions without securing any licensing agreements to train its widely used Claude AI system. The complaint, reviewed by BBC News, singles out globally beloved Presley hits including *All Shook Up*, *Can’t Help Falling in Love*, *Don’t Be Cruel*, *Return To Sender*, and *A Little Less Conversation* as part of the unauthorised dataset used to build the generative AI model. Authentic Brands’ legal team emphasized in the filing that the Presley catalog represents some of the most culturally transformative, genre-defining musical works ever created, and the company has a longstanding policy of rigorously protecting these iconic pieces from unapproved exploitation. The lawsuit further accuses Anthropic of constructing its entire commercial business model on unprecedented, mass-scale copyright infringement, alleging that Claude not only ingests the original copyrighted tracks during training but also generates unlicensed derivative works that closely mimic the structure, hooks, and core creative framework of the original songs, even when reworded slightly. The filing cites test interactions with the latest iteration of Claude, in which the AI openly acknowledged that its outputs for “modern audience” reimaginings of Presley tracks land extremely close to the original compositions, crossing well beyond the bounds of permissible creative inspiration into unauthorised reproduction. Authentic Brands is seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed track, amounting to a total claimed sum of $41 million. This new legal action adds to a growing list of ongoing copyright disputes facing Anthropic: just one week prior, music industry firm Reservoir filed a separate suit accusing the AI developer of stealing copyrighted lyrics, while Universal Music Group launched its own legal challenge against the company back in January. The lawsuit also references Anthropic’s 2023 $1.5 billion settlement of a class action suit brought by a coalition of authors, which at the time was the largest publicly documented copyright recovery in U.S. legal history for creators whose work was used to train generative AI systems without consent. A spokesperson for Anthropic pushed back against the new allegations in a statement to BBC News, noting that the firm rejects all claims laid out in the Presley rights suit and intends to mount a full, vigorous defence in court.