The Man in Black could not have imagined this. AI companies Suno and Anthropic face a combined $338 million in lawsuits for allegedly using songs and lyrics by Madonna, Johnny Cash and Joni Mitchell to train their artificial intelligence systems.
Reservoir Media Management, a music rights company, filed two separate lawsuits on October 21. In one of them, Reservoir accused Suno of scraping 1,050 copyright songs – including Cash’s Ring of Fire, Mitchell’s Both Sides Now and Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach. Suno is a platform where users can generate an AI song with just a text prompt.
In the other lawsuit, Reservoir accuses Anthropic of using the copyrighted lyrics of 853 songs to train its Claude family of AI models. Some of the songs mentioned in that lawsuit include Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi, Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life and Evanescence’s Bring Me to Life.
“We disagree with the allegations and intend to vigorously defend this case,” a representative for Anthropic told Billboard.
Representatives for Suno and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reservoir is seeking $186.4 million in damages from Suno and $151.4 million from Anthropic. Both laws accuse the companies of copyright infringement, bypassing restrictions such as login and paywalls and removing song credits from the title, writer and publisher data.
Anthropic was also sued last week for copyright infringement for using 274 Elvis Presley songs to train Claude. The company has been sued more than a dozen times for copyright infringement — most notably in a $1.5 billion settlement over allegations that it trained its AI on millions of pirated books. Suno also faces multiple copyright infringement lawsuits, including a second from Sony Music and Universal Music Group.
Reservoir founder and CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi told Music Business Worldwide that the AI music industry is not allowed to exploit the work of songwriters.
“If we believe that their work has been exploited without authorization, we will hold AI platforms legally responsible to ensure that these rights are preserved,” Khosrowshahi said. “We will continue to advocate for a framework that supports technological progress while protecting the creative work at the heart of our industry.”
Laws arise
Copyright infringement – from news articles, music, books and art – has become a major issue, with several AI companies accused of stealing data to train AI models such as Claude, OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok. There’s even a website, the AI Lawsuit Tracker, that counts 145 copyright infringements — more than half of the total cases against AI companies.
AI models are trained when companies feed large amounts of data—text, images, music, videos, and software code—into their AI systems. With all that data, as well as synthetic data generated by computers, AI models can learn to generate words, images and videos that can appear human-made.
In the lawsuit filed last week, Reservoir said Suno had already admitted to copying “substantially all music files of reasonable quality accessible on the open Internet,” a statement Suno made in court during a 2024 lawsuit filed by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.
This summer, a hacker cracked Suno’s code and revealed that the company allegedly scraped music and lyrics from platforms such as YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius and stock music libraries. The hack exposed more than 2 million clips in a folder called “youtube_music,” as well as thousands of hours of music from lyrics database Genius HQ, music streaming service Deezer, and stock music site Pond5.
In the lawsuit, Reservoir says that Suno is not really a platform for people to create music and “instead was always intended to replace artists whose works have been illegally copied by reaching those artists’ listeners directly with AI-generated substitutes that copy the originals.”
Anthropic alleged credits dismissed
Reservoir also accused Anthropic of using a text extraction tool called Newspaper, which removes copyright notices from written material. Reservoir said Claude is trained in part on lyrics collected by Common Crawl, a web crawler that, during its crawls, unknowingly picks up lyrics from licensed sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind.