Who is suing
The plaintiffs, who call themselves the Elvis Plaintiffs, are two companies based in New York (ABG EPE IP LLC and Raleigh Music Publishing LLC), Abilene Music LLC, three family trusts and one individual. Together they say they own or control the exclusive rights in 274 registered compositions listed in Exhibit A. They license the lyrics to aggregators such as Musixmatch and LyricFind on terms that require the title and songwriter credits to be displayed with them. That licensing practice is how they say the CMI travels with the lyrics.
Counsel are Adams and Reese and Skaggs Faucette. The complaint says at least six suits over musical compositions are pending against Anthropic in the district. For its most recent output examples, the complaint cites Round Hill Music LP v. Anthropic PBC (N.D. Cal., filed 17 August 2026).
Five theories of liability
| Theory | What the complaint alleges | Paragraphs |
|---|---|---|
| Acquisition and training | Lyrics reached Anthropic through Common Crawl, a books dataset, The Pile and its YouTube Subtitles subset, Internet Archive captures of lyric sites, and books torrented from Library Genesis and PiLiMi. Each new Claude model is pleaded as a new infringing copy in its weights. | ¶¶ 30-46 |
| Indefinite retention | Keeping the works in a permanent, general-purpose data store is pleaded as standalone infringement, relying on Judge Alsup’s holding in Bartz that such a library is not fair use. | ¶¶ 47-50, 76 |
| Removal of CMI | Anthropic is said to have tested Readability, Newspaper and jusText and picked Newspaper because it stripped more author and publisher information. | ¶¶ 51-54, 95-100 |
| Outputs | Claude reproduced lyrics on request before guardrails were added, and recent models that now refuse direct lyric requests will still rewrite the songs “for a modern audience” with the same structure and hooks. | ¶¶ 55-70, 86-88 |
| Circumvention | Scraping tools are said to have bypassed logins, paywalls, CAPTCHAs, rate limits and robots.txt directives on licensed lyric platforms. | ¶¶ 90-94 |
The evidence the complaint relies on
Much of the factual support is borrowed from other cases. The complaint cites Anthropic’s admissions in Bartz that at least one released Claude model was trained on data from a version of The Pile including YouTube subtitles, and Judge Alsup’s findings about pirated libraries. For outputs it relies on the Concord record, including the publishers’ expert analysis of more than 100 Anthropic records, on example conversations in Anthropic’s public hh-rlhf preference dataset, and on the Round Hill complaint.
The work-specific allegations are narrower. Five of the 274 songs are named as appearing in public listings of the YouTube Subtitles data, and two are tied to 2010 Wayback Machine captures of a lyrics site. The claim that Claude has produced infringing output for all 274 works is made on information and belief, with the plaintiffs saying the user logs that would prove it are in Anthropic’s hands. The only specific example of output after the guardrails is an undated exchange, quoted without naming the song, in which Sonnet 5 described its own rewrites as landing very close to the originals (¶ 67). The footnote beside it cites the Round Hill examples.
Damages math and remedies
| Count | Statutory basis | Per work | × 274 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copyright infringement (willful) | § 504(c) | $150,000 | $41,100,000 |
| Circumvention | § 1203(c)(3)(A) | $2,500 | $685,000 |
| Removal of CMI | § 1203(c)(3)(B) | $25,000 | $6,850,000 |
| Sum of the maximum statutory figures pleaded | $48,635,000 |
The DMCA figures assume one violation per work. Beyond damages, the prayer asks for impoundment or destruction under § 503(b) of copies held in training datasets, internal repositories, server infrastructure and model weights, and for a full accounting of training data and scraping involving the works.
Relation to the Concord cases
The complaint identifies Concord I, Concord II and BMG v. Anthropic as related actions pending in the district. The case was initially assigned to Judge Orrick. If it is related to the music cases before Judge Lee, the summary-judgment rulings in Concord I will shape this case early.
Evidence notes
IPLYR’s reading of what the plaintiffs will need to prove, set against the record in Concord I. These are observations about method, not predictions about the outcome.
- The pleading has a per-work gap.
- At summary judgment in Concord I, the fight is over which outputs exist for which works and who prompted them. Here the output claim covers 274 works on information and belief, and only a handful are tied to a specific source. Work-by-work evidence, with prompt authorship recorded, is what this case will turn on.
- Rewrites need their own measurement.
- Verbatim and near-verbatim recall metrics will understate an output that keeps a song’s structure and hooks while changing words. Comparing those outputs requires a defined method, such as line-level alignment, hook and refrain overlap, and rhyme and stanza structure. Judge Lee has already asked how a plaintiff would identify infringement in non-verbatim output. A model’s own description of what it wrote is a statement, not a measurement.
- Results are version-specific.
- The complaint treats each release from Fable 5 and Mythos 5 (9 June 2026) to Sonnet 5 (30 June) and Opus 5 (24 July) as a new copy. Any testing has to be pinned to exact model identifiers, decoding settings and dates, because a finding on one version says nothing reliable about the next.
- The CMI theory meets the Concord record.
- The Newspaper allegation is the same one that kept the DMCA claim alive in Concord I, and Judge Breyer cited it in Beaulier as the kind of deliberate choice that pleads intent. In Concord I, Anthropic says the discovery record showed the tool works on page headers and footers rather than lyric text. Plaintiffs here will face that record.
Documents
| Date | ECF | Document | Filed by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Oct 2026 | 1 | Complaint for direct copyright infringement, circumvention of protection measures, and removal or alteration of CMI | Plaintiffs |
The complaint links to the copy hosted by ChatGPT Is Eating the World. Exhibit A (the list of works) is referenced in the complaint and will be added when available.