Reservoir Sues Anthropic and Suno Over Songs

Reservoir Media Management filed two copyright lawsuits on Oct. 21 seeking a combined $338 million from Anthropic and Suno. The music rights company alleges that the AI firms used songs and lyrics without permission to train their systems, and accuses both of circumventing restrictions such as logins and paywalls and removing song title, writer and publisher credits.

Reservoir seeks $186.4 million from Suno, alleging it scraped 1,050 copyrighted songs, including Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach.” Suno lets users generate songs from text prompts. In the separate case, Reservoir seeks $151.4 million from Anthropic, alleging it used lyrics from 853 songs to train its Claude models. The complaint names Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” and Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life.” Anthropic said it disagrees with the allegations and intends to defend itself; representatives of both companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Reservoir founder and CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi said the company would hold AI platforms legally accountable when it believes songwriters’ work was used without authorization, while supporting a framework that protects creative work and technological progress. Reservoir also alleges Suno was built to replace artists with AI-generated substitutes. It cited Suno’s statement in a 2024 lawsuit that it copied “essentially all music files of reasonable quality” accessible on the open internet.

Reservoir says Anthropic used a text-extraction tool called Newspaper, which removes copyright notices, and that Claude is partly trained on lyrics gathered through Common Crawl. That web crawler can pick up lyrics from licensed sites including Musixmatch and LyricFind. Anthropic was also sued the previous week over alleged use of 274 Elvis Presley songs to train Claude, and has faced more than a dozen copyright suits, including a $1.5 billion settlement over allegations involving millions of pirated books. Suno faces other copyright cases, including one brought by Sony Music and Universal Music Group. The AI Lawsuit Tracker counts 145 copyright infringement lawsuits against AI companies, more than half of their overall cases.

A hack of Suno’s code this summer allegedly revealed more than 2 million clips in a “youtube_music” folder and thousands of hours of music from Genius HQ, Deezer and Pond5. Reservoir alleges the company scraped material from YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius and stock-music libraries.

Reservoir Media Management filed two copyright lawsuits on Oct. 21 seeking a combined $338 million from Anthropic and Suno. The music rights company alleges that the AI firms used songs and lyrics without permission to train their systems, and accuses both of circumventing restrictions such as logins and paywalls and removing song title, writer and publisher credits.

Reservoir seeks $186.4 million from Suno, alleging it scraped 1,050 copyrighted songs, including Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach.” Suno lets users generate songs from text prompts. In the separate case, Reservoir seeks $151.4 million from Anthropic, alleging it used lyrics from 853 songs to train its Claude models. The complaint names Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” and Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life.” Anthropic said it disagrees with the allegations and intends to defend itself; representatives of both companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Reservoir founder and CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi said the company would hold AI platforms legally accountable when it believes songwriters’ work was used without authorization, while supporting a framework that protects creative work and technological progress. Reservoir also alleges Suno was built to replace artists with AI-generated substitutes. It cited Suno’s statement in a 2024 lawsuit that it copied “essentially all music files of reasonable quality” accessible on the open internet.

Reservoir says Anthropic used a text-extraction tool called Newspaper, which removes copyright notices, and that Claude is partly trained on lyrics gathered through Common Crawl. That web crawler can pick up lyrics from licensed sites including Musixmatch and LyricFind. Anthropic was also sued the previous week over alleged use of 274 Elvis Presley songs to train Claude, and has faced more than a dozen copyright suits, including a $1.5 billion settlement over allegations involving millions of pirated books. Suno faces other copyright cases, including one brought by Sony Music and Universal Music Group. The AI Lawsuit Tracker counts 145 copyright infringement lawsuits against AI companies, more than half of their overall cases.

A hack of Suno’s code this summer allegedly revealed more than 2 million clips in a “youtube_music” folder and thousands of hours of music from Genius HQ, Deezer and Pond5. Reservoir alleges the company scraped material from YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius and stock-music libraries.