Elvis Presley and Reservoir Catalogs Sue Anthropic Over Claude Lyrics in the Same Week

TL;DR

On October 21, Reservoir Media sued Anthropic in the Northern District of California over the lyrics of 853 songs, including Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" and Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." Two days later, a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group and other Elvis Presley rights holders filed a second suit covering 274 Presley songs. Richard Busch is lead counsel on both. Each complaint seeks up to $150,000 per song and describes the same test: Claude declines to print the lyrics, then rewrites the song "for a modern audience" and keeps its structure and hooks. If you build anything that generates text around existing songs, the claim to watch is that rewrite.

Two suits, one playbook

Reservoir Media Management v. Anthropic PBC (case 5:26-cv-12308) was filed on October 21 by Reservoir, its UK arm, and Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. The same day, Reservoir sued Suno over 1,050 compositions, Music Ally reported. Besides Mitchell and Cash, the Anthropic complaint names Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach," Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life," and Miami Sound Machine's "Conga."

The Elvis suit landed on Friday, October 23. NBC News and NME report that it covers 274 songs, among them "Can't Help Falling in Love," "All Shook Up," "Don't Be Cruel," and "A Little Less Conversation." The plaintiffs want a permanent injunction, destruction of unauthorized copies, and statutory damages of up to $41.1 million. An Anthropic spokesperson told NBC: "We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully."

Busch is the lawyer who represented Marvin Gaye's estate in the "Blurred Lines" case. He also represents Round Hill, which sued Anthropic on August 17. Whatever Anthropic thinks of these suits, it now knows who drafts them.

The "modern audience" test

The 2023 suit by Concord, Universal Music Publishing Group, and ABKCO was mostly about Claude printing lyrics verbatim. According to the Reservoir complaint, Anthropic responded with output filters that refuse to reproduce recognized song lyrics. The filing says those filters cover "only a narrow subset of commercially prominent songs" and that rephrasing the prompt gets around them.

The new complaints go after what Claude does when it refuses. Reservoir says Claude Haiku 4.5 and Sonnet 5 both decline to print the lyrics but "have no problem creating derivative works based upon those copyrighted lyrics." Asked to recreate specific songs "for a modern audience," Claude produced versions that, in the complaint's own quote of the model, "keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges. That's edging past 'inspired by' into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out."

So the plaintiffs' best exhibit is Claude reviewing its own homework. NME and NBC say the Elvis complaint makes the same "modern audience" allegation, and the Reservoir filing cites the August Round Hill complaint for similar outputs on "Iris," "I Got You (I Feel Good)," and "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

Think of it like a cover band that is barred from singing the original words, so it sings new ones over the same melody, verse order, and chorus. The publishers argue that a song's composition copyright covers more than the exact words, so a reworded copy with the same bones is still their song. That theory is what turns a lyrics filter from a defense into a partial one.

Where the training claims come from

Reservoir's input-side theory is familiar. It says Anthropic trained on Common Crawl and the Books3 dataset, and that both contain its lyrics scraped from licensed sites such as Musixmatch and LyricFind. Reservoir licenses lyrics to those aggregators on the condition that they show the title, writers, and publisher alongside the text.

From that, the complaint builds two DMCA counts on top of plain infringement:

• Section 1202: Anthropic's data-cleaning pipeline allegedly stripped the copyright management information (writer, publisher, copyright notice) from the lyrics. The complaint notes that in October 2025 the judge in the Concord case found similar allegations sufficient at the pleading stage.
• Section 1201: Anthropic allegedly circumvented access controls on licensed lyric sites, which the complaint lists as logins, paywalls, CAPTCHAs, rate limits, and robots.txt directives.

It also leans on the record from Bartz v. Anthropic, the authors' case that ended in what NBC calls a $1.5 billion settlement, quoting that court's findings about Anthropic downloading Library Genesis.

The money

The damages figures are statutory ceilings for willful infringement, not amounts anyone has proved. Reservoir does the arithmetic in its filing: 853 works at $150,000 each comes to $127,950,000. It adds $2,500 per work under section 1201 and $25,000 per work under section 1202. The Elvis plaintiffs' infringement ceiling is $41.1 million.

The Reservoir complaint itself cites a $1.2 trillion secondary-market valuation for Anthropic, so the ceilings alone will not sink anyone. A ruling on the rewrite theory would matter more, because it would carry into every pending case. The Reservoir complaint lists three related lyrics cases still pending in the same district (two Concord suits and one from BMG), and NBC reports Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed their own this year. Every new plaintiff adds songs and repeats the same output test.

What it means if you build on lyrics or songs

• Refusing verbatim output is not enough. If your app rewrites, parodies, or "modernizes" songs, the plaintiffs' theory says structure and hooks can infringe even with new words. Fair use questions like parody have not been decided in these cases, so treat this as a live risk.
• Licensed lyric data exists. LyricFind and Musixmatch already license lyrics to apps, and the Suno complaint argues that Suno's deals with WMG, BMG, and Believe show a functioning market for training licenses. That argument gets easier for plaintiffs every time a lab signs one.
• Your own model can testify against you. The most quoted line in these filings is Claude's own description of its output, and nothing stops a plaintiff from doing the same to your product.

Key Takeaways

• Reservoir Media (853 songs, filed October 21) and Elvis Presley's rights holders (274 songs, filed October 23) both sued Anthropic, with Richard Busch as lead counsel on both.
• Both complaints say Claude refuses to print lyrics but rewrites songs "for a modern audience" with the same structure and hooks, and they call that an unlicensed derivative work.
• Reservoir adds DMCA claims for stripped copyright metadata and circumvented access controls on licensed lyric sites.
• The statutory ceilings are $127.95 million for Reservoir's infringement claim and $41.1 million for the Elvis suit, with nothing yet proved.
• Anthropic says it will "defend this case fully" against the Elvis suit; at least three other lyrics cases are pending against it in the same district.

Sources: Reservoir Media Management v. Anthropic PBC complaint, N.D. Cal. 5:26-cv-12308, NBC News via Yahoo, NME, Music Ally