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Companies are accused of training their AI models using copyrighted music and lyrics.
The Man in Black couldn’t 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 Oct. 21. In one of them, Reservoir accuses Suno of scraping 1,050 copyrighted 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 using only a text prompt.
In the other lawsuit, Reservoir accuses Anthropic of using copyrighted lyrics from 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 defend this case vigorously,” a representative for Anthropic told Billboard.
Representatives for Suno and Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reservoir seeks $186.4 million in damages from Suno and $151.4 million from Anthropic. Both lawsuits accuse the companies of copyright infringement, circumventing restrictions such as logins and paywalls and stripping song credits of title, writer and publisher data.
Anthropic was also sued last week for violating copyright for reportedly 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 several 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 can’t be allowed to exploit songwriters’ work.
“When we believe their work has been exploited without authorization, we will hold AI platforms legally accountable to ensure those rights are upheld,” 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.”
Copyright infringement — of news articles, music, books and art — has become a major issue, with several AI companies accused of ingesting mountains of 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 infringement lawsuits — more than half of the overall cases against AI companies.
AI models are trained when their companies feed a vast amount 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 video that may appear human-created.
In the lawsuit filed last week, Reservoir said Suno has already admitted to copying “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet,” a statement Suno made in court during a 2024 suit brought by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group.
This summer, a hacker cracked into Suno’s code and revealed that the company allegedly scraped music and lyrics from platforms like YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius and stock music libraries. The hack showed more than 2 million clips in a folder called “youtube_music,” as well as thousands of hours of music from the lyrics database Genius HQ, the music streaming service Deezer, and the stock music site Pond5.
In the lawsuit, Reservoir says that Suno is not truly a platform for people to create music and “was instead always meant to replace the artists whose works were being unlawfully copied by directly reaching those artists’ listeners with AI-generated substitutes which copy the originals.”
Reservoir also accused Anthropic of using a text-extraction tool called Newspaper, which removes copyright notices from written material. Reservoir said Claude is partly trained on lyrics collected from Common Crawl, a web crawler that, during its crawls, inadvertently picks up lyrics from licensed sites such as Musixmatch and LyricFind.