Music rights company sues two AI firms over songs by Madonna and Johnny Cash

A music rights company called Reservoir Media Management has sued two AI companies, Suno and Anthropic, over songs by Madonna, Johnny Cash and Joni Mitchell. The two lawsuits, filed on Oct. 21, seek about $338 million combined. Reservoir says the companies used copyrighted music and lyrics to train their AI systems without permission.

What the lawsuits claim

Against Suno, Reservoir says the company scraped 1,050 copyrighted songs. They include Cash's Ring of Fire, Mitchell's Both Sides Now and Madonna's Papa Don't Preach. Suno is a platform where users type a text prompt and get an AI-generated song.

Against Anthropic, Reservoir says lyrics from 853 songs were used to train Claude, the company's family of AI models. Examples include Big Yellow Taxi, Lush Life and Bring Me to Life.

Reservoir wants $186.4 million from Suno and $151.4 million from Anthropic. Both suits claim copyright infringement, getting around restrictions such as logins and paywalls, and stripping song credits of title, writer and publisher data.

The evidence Reservoir points to

Reservoir says Suno admitted in court, during a 2024 suit by Universal, Sony and Warner, to copying "essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet." This summer, a hacker got into Suno's code. The leak allegedly showed scraping from YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius and stock music libraries, including more than 2 million clips in a folder named "youtube_music."

For Anthropic, Reservoir points to a text-extraction tool called Newspaper, which removes copyright notices from written material. It also says Claude is partly trained on lyrics from Common Crawl, a web crawler that can accidentally pick up lyrics from licensed sites such as Musixmatch and LyricFind.

How the companies responded

Anthropic told Billboard, "We disagree with the allegations and intend to defend this case vigorously." Suno and Anthropic did not immediately respond to CNET's requests for comment. These are claims by Reservoir, not court findings.

Both companies already face other suits. Anthropic was sued last week over 274 Elvis Presley songs. It has been sued more than a dozen times, including a $1.5 billion settlement over allegations it trained on millions of pirated books. Suno faces several suits, including a second from Sony Music and Universal Music Group.

Why it matters

AI models learn by taking in huge amounts of text, images, music, video and code. A site called the AI Lawsuit Tracker counts 145 copyright suits, more than half of all cases against AI companies. How courts rule could decide whether AI tools must pay for the music and writing they learn from. That may shape the price and rules of tools people use.