Erlikosaurus was named by Barsbold and Perle (1980). Its type is Erlikosaurus andrewsi. It was considered monophyletic by Currie (2000).

It was corrected as Erlicosaurus by Carroll (1988) and Clark et al. (1995).

It was assigned to Segnosauria by Paul (1984) and Clark et al. (1993); to Segnosauridae by Barsbold and Perle (1980), Perle (1981), Barsbold (1983), Carroll (1988), Mader and Bradley (1989), Currie (1992), Currie and Eberth (1993) and Nessov (1995); to Erlikosauridae by Eberth et al. (2001); to Therizinosauroidea by Barsbold (1997) and Gianechini et al. (2011); to Therizinosauridae by Russell and Dong (1994), Clark et al. (1994), Clark et al. (1995), Sues (1997), Sereno (1998), Currie (2000), Zhang et al. (2001), Xu et al. (2002), Rauhut (2003), Clark et al. (2004), Zanno (2004), Kirkland et al. (2005), Zanno (2006), Li et al. (2007), Zanno (2010), Senter et al. (2012) and Pu et al. (2013); and to Therizinosauria by Russell (1997) and Hendrickx and Mateus (2014).